A Treatise on Shelling Beans (24 page)

Besides, what could a watchman like that actually see when he was drunk himself, and every drunk thinks that it’s other people who are drunk, not him. The watchmen had supposedly been given a crate of vodka, and they’d drunk the whole lot when they sent him out for another bottle. You can imagine how far gone he was. The watchmen were like that. They had uniforms and rifles, but things were always getting pinched from the site. One time someone even stole a tractor. And they didn’t see a thing. So how could you believe him? But he said what he said, and other people repeated his words after him.

In any case, after the wedding bad things started happening between them. Him, he didn’t even look up when she served him his soup or his main course in the cafeteria. And as for her, it no longer made a difference whether she was
putting the food in front of him or someone else. Her eyes seemed to be losing their shine from one day to the next. You couldn’t say, You look nice today, Miss Basia, or Basieńka, because she looked like she might burst into tears. She unbraided her hair and just tied it behind with a ribbon. It still looked nice, but it wasn’t the same as when she’d worn the braid. But no one had the courage to ask her why she’d done it.

The Priest stopped coming to the cafeteria, and that made you wonder as well. Apparently he went to some tavern to eat. Then one day she happened to be bringing the main course to the table where I was sitting when someone ran in to say that the Priest had fallen from the scaffolding. Either he’d fallen or it was something else, in any case the guy shouted to the whole cafeteria that he’d fallen. She had one more plate to put on the table and, as chance would have it it was mine. The plate fell from her hands to the floor. She burst out crying, covered her face with her hands and ran into the kitchen. What went on in there I couldn’t tell you. But people in the cafeteria could have thought it was because of the dropped plate.

We all rushed to the door, people came hurrying from the offices and from management, everyone was running, a crowd gathered and it was hard to push through to the place where he’d fallen. Someone checked his pulse and his heart, but he was dead. Soon an ambulance came, the police, they started questioning people and asking about witnesses. But it wasn’t by accident that it had happened at lunchtime, if you ask me.

I didn’t see her again that day. And him, he left that same evening. For the next few days she didn’t work in the cafeteria. One of the cooks took her place. They said she’d taken some sick days, but she’d be back soon. And she did come back. Only, you wouldn’t have recognized her. She took soup to the men from the foreign contract and right away she asked them when he was coming back. They didn’t say anything. She brought them their main course and asked again when he would be coming back. When they still said nothing, she made such a scene that they got up and left. She was crying and shouting that they’d come to
get their meal and they’d left him to do all the work. He’d get exhausted working so much. As it was he didn’t look well. He was pale, he’d lost weight. The next day she was fired.

After that, from time to time she’d come to the cafeteria, stand by the hatch and say to the cooks that she just wanted to serve him his meal when he came. And the cooks, like you’d expect with cooks, they’d say to her, Come in to the kitchen, sit yourself down, we’ll tell you when he comes and you can serve him, we can see the door from here, when he comes in we’ll let you know.

You’d also meet her outside the gate waiting for him to get off work. Everyone had already left, but she’d sometimes wait till dusk, till night. It would be raining, pouring even, but she’d wait. She didn’t have her umbrella anymore, who knew what had happened to it. Out of pity the watchmen would sometimes bring her in to the watch house so she wouldn’t get so wet. Or they’d tell her to go away, that there was no point in waiting.

“My husband works here,” she would reply.

“He used to, but he doesn’t anymore. And what do you mean, your husband?”

“He’s my husband, he took an oath. I wore a wedding gown, a priest married us.”

“What do you mean, a priest. He was a welder. Besides, he’s dead now.”

Sometimes she’d beg them to let her onto the site.

“Let me in.”

“Come to your senses, girl.”

“I’ll just tell him I’m waiting for him.”

Occasionally they’d let her in. If not, she’d squeeze through a hole in the fence. She knew all the holes, after all. Even when they saw her wandering around the site they didn’t drive her off. They turned a blind eye. If someone from management had seen her they had a good excuse, that they’d not let her in through the main gate. Besides, she was quiet, all she did was walk around the main yard. She never stopped anyone, never asked any questions. If someone came along she wouldn’t hide anymore. No one asked her any questions
either, everyone knew. Sometimes she’d sit down somewhere and lose herself in thought, like she didn’t even know where she was.

From time to time I’d cross paths with her when I happened to work late on the site. One time it was almost evening, she was sitting on a crate.

“Oh, Miss Basia,” I said.

“It’s not ‘miss’ anymore,” she said. “I’m married. Who are you?”

“An electrician, Miss Basia.”

“Oh, right. I remember you from the cafeteria. I used to think you were cute. You were a shy one, I remember. You used to want me to be your wife. A lot of them did.”

She surprised me, I’d never told her that. I wanted to say to her it wasn’t that I used to want her to be my wife, I still did now. You might not believe it, but I suddenly felt like I wanted to be in her unhappiness with her. True love is a wound. You can only find it inside yourself when someone else’s pain hurts you like your own.

But before I could explain this to her she said:

“Except that you guys working on building sites, wherever your site is, that’s where your wife is. What do you know about love.”

My courage failed me.

“Help me find my way out of here.”

“The gate’s over there,” I said. “I’ll walk you out.”

“I don’t want to use the gate.” She looked at me as if with those old eyes from the cafeteria. “You know, I still think you’re cute. But I already have a husband.”

Let me tell you, he changed my life. You know, the warehouse guy. I told you about him. The warehouse worker that turned out to be a saxophonist. I don’t know why you find it surprising. I mean, back then hardly anyone was who he was. A welder would turn out to be a priest. There were all kinds of guys working on building sites, hidden behind different occupations. But often it was only over vodka that you’d find out stuff like that. And not the first time you drank with them. Anyone who didn’t drink, or only occasionally, they weren’t trusted. It was because of that that I turned to drink. They’d ask a few questions but in only a general way. It wasn’t till later they’d start to probe into your life. Or your conscience. Especially since our consciences had turned out to be something different than before. You think a conscience is something permanent? Too bad you never worked on a building site back then. It was probably the same in other places. But I worked on building sites and that’s all I can speak about. You know, any change in the world is an assault on people’s consciences. Especially when it’s an attempt to make a new and better world.

In any case, you’d never have met such a mixture of people anywhere else. Bricklayers, concrete workers, plasterers, welders, electricians, crane operators, drivers, delivery men, all kinds, same in the offices, and it would turn out that one of them had been one thing, another had been something else, one
was from here, another from there, they’d been in camps, prisons, one army or another, they’d fought in the uprising, in the woods, they had kidney problems from being beaten, they were missing teeth or fingernails, they were ageless, or still really young but already gray-haired. Every building site in those days was a true Tower of Babel, not of languages, but of what could happen to people. Though there were also folks, a good few of them, who had changed profession of their own accord so they could take part in building a better world, because they’d stopped believing in the old one.

I don’t remember now which site it was, but on one of them there was this guy that worked in the planning department. People would say, the planning guy, and everyone knew who you meant. So one time, over vodka he let on he’d been a history teacher. He couldn’t hold his liquor, he got drunk and started talking about how history had deceived him. Imagine that, history had deceived him. Like history could deceive anyone. It’s us who keep deceiving history, depending on what we want from it.

Besides, if you ask me everyone lives his own life, and every life is a separate history. The fact that we try and pour it all into a single container, into one big immensity, doesn’t lead to any truth about humanity. You can imagine a history of all the individual people that ever lived. You say that’s impossible? I know it is. But you can imagine it. Yet nothing exists in the abstract, especially people. I don’t know how you see the world. Me, like I said, I see it from one or another building site. They were always individual people, each one different from the next. They’d be called a team, the way you talk about history, but that was only at meetings.

For instance, on one site there was a philosophy student. Actually he’d completed his studies, he only had one exam to go when the war broke out. Then after the war he learned to lay parquet floors. He was even a foreman, I was friends with him a bit. He drank like the blazes. He had a strong head, and not just for philosophy. One time, when we were drinking he began talking about the studies he’d broken off, and someone asked him:

“Why didn’t you finish? You could have done it after the war. What’s one exam?”

His eyes became bloodshot, and we hadn’t drunk so much at that point.

“What the hell for? What use is philosophy to me after all that? No mind could comprehend it. Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant – none of them could have. Screw the lot of them!” He slammed his glass down on the table.

We all exchanged glances, because none of us knew who all those people were that had gotten under his skin like that. No one dared ask either, because maybe we were supposed to know. Someone just said:

“You find the same sons of bitches wherever you go, sounds like. Not just on building sites.” He poured the other guy a brimming glass. “Here you go.”

Believe me, if I hadn’t worked on building sites, and also, well, if I hadn’t been a drinker … Anyway, it was on building sites that I learned how to live. And it was thanks to all the different people I met, that I wouldn’t have run across anywhere else. I really owe them a lot. I might even say that each one of them might not have actually felt like living. They all had their reasons. But they
were
living. Above all I’m grateful to them because even though it often seemed a particular price was too much to pay, and there was nowhere to borrow from, still you had to keep on living. And most important of all, I realized that I myself wasn’t an exception. Or if I was then the world was filled with exceptions. But those things only came out over vodka. So how could you not drink?

For instance, one person worked in the benefits department handing out bars of soap, towels, rubber boots, work gloves, they could have been just anyone, but over vodka they turned out to be one thing or another. Someone else operated a backhoe, it seemed like other than the backhoe all he knew how to do was drink vodka, but after a bottle or two he’d recite poems from memory. With another guy, it was Cicero in Latin. And thanks to the vodka you could even enjoy listening to it.

On another site there was someone who’d been a policeman before the war. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but I reckon any change in the world starts
with the police. He’d had to hide his past, because during the war he’d also been a policeman, the organization had ordered him to be. It goes without saying he had no certificate after the war to prove it. Who could it have been from? With an official stamp to boot? The people who could have corroborated his story were apparently dead. And how many of them could there have been anyway? Two or three at the most. So after the war he moved from place to place to cover his tracks. He’d learned a couple of trades in the meantime. On our site he was a plasterer. But he drank too much, if you ask me. And when he did, he’d tear open his shirt and pound his own chest till it rang, shouting that the organization had ordered him to. Even over vodka there were always limits as to how open you could be. Me, I never said too much at such times, at most I’d talk about how things had been on other sites. Whereas him, once he’d gotten all emotional about how the organization had ordered him to do it, he’d always swear by Our Lady of Ostra Brama, which made it all the more suspicious, because Our Lady of Ostra Brama wasn’t in Poland anymore. A policeman, yet he couldn’t keep a cool head when he was drinking.

There were other guys that even when they were dead drunk, they could have been drowning in misery and their hearts bursting with revelations, but still they wouldn’t say a word more than they wanted to. Someone who has a calling to drink, who doesn’t just drink from one opportunity to the next, they know ways to say a lot while saying nothing, how to laugh when inside the last thing you feel like doing is laughing, how to believe in something when you don’t believe in anything, even in a new and better world.

I don’t know what happened to the policeman, because soon after that I moved to another site. Not for any particular reason. Maybe I thought that on a different site I’d drink less, or stop altogether. In general, whenever I’d worked on one site for too long I got the feeling it was winding itself around me, sucking me in. I couldn’t stand it, and I’d move to another site. You probably think I was impatient, like any young person. It wasn’t that. I just couldn’t get attached to any one place. Actually, the thought of getting attached scared me.

No, I didn’t have any problems with that. I was a good electrician. They always assigned me to the toughest jobs. When it came to hooking up new machinery or equipment, it was always me. There wasn’t a problem I couldn’t fix. I got complimented the whole time, they gave me all kinds of certificates. I never missed a bonus. Or even when something needed mending in the apartment of one of the directors, they’d always bring me in, at the request of the director or his wife. Anyone could have done it, it was only the iron or the hot plate, or just a light bulb that had burned out, but I was the one they asked for.