A Treatise on Shelling Beans (38 page)

Perhaps you could buy a cabin here? What for? Oh, I don’t know. I just thought you might be looking for a place. You wouldn’t have to come every weekend. I’d even advise against it. Or spend all of your vacations here. One or two visits a year would be quite enough. And best of all at these kinds of time, in the off-season. I’d mind your place like I do all the others. You wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.

A few of the cabins are up for sale. Twenty-two, thirty-one, and I think forty-six or forty-seven, I don’t recall. There may well be others, I’d have to check. Oh yes, a lot of people have sold their cabins since I’ve been here. Recently there’s not been much interest in buying. Once in a while someone comes through, takes a good long look around, and doesn’t know if he wants to buy or if he’s just looking. To begin with people would often drop by, they’d leave their address and phone number with me in case anyone happened to be selling a cabin. No one’s building any new ones anymore either. Though it’s a decent place, as you can see – there’s the lake, the woods, the air’s good.

The animals around here have gotten so tame that the deer sometimes come right up to the cabins. Not for food. Food they have in the woods, everything they need. The squirrels hop about on the decks and peek into the cabins. It’s another matter that the people here spoil them rotten. They bring them bagfuls of nuts. More than the squirrels could ever eat, or bury in the ground. You walk along and at every step there are nuts crunching under your feet. I was even thinking of adding to the signs, saying, Do not feed the squirrels. Because so what if they eat from people’s hands during the season? The season doesn’t last forever. Sometimes a wild boar comes through here. Sometimes you see a hare
scooting between the cabins. You can see weasels, martens. Often you’re more likely to see them here than in the woods.

One time a moose appeared. And it didn’t just stop for a moment on the bank. It walked right between the cabins, stopped here, stopped there. People started shouting, there was a bit of a panic. Some people took shelter in their cabins, others jumped into boats and canoes or hopped into the water, someone nearly drowned because they didn’t know how to swim. Someone fainted – luckily some of the cabin owners are doctors. The moose went down to the lake, had a drink, bellowed, and calmly went its way. Even a moose sometimes has a yen to be among people.

Or if you were to get up before sunrise, when the birds wake up. If you got to breathe that fresh early morning air, you’d feel your lungs opening up, and what good air really is. In other places people are quite unaware they’re breathing, or of what they’re breathing. If you thought too much about it, you could lose the will to breathe altogether. I already told you about the mushrooms, the blueberries, wild strawberries, cranberries. But best of all is just to go into the woods and not pick anything, not think anything. When it’s just you and the woods.

I don’t even like to take the dogs. They get distracted by every rustle and off they rush. Then try calling them back, Rex! Paws! One time they chased a deer. I kept calling them, looking for them. In the woods the trees deaden your voice. In the end I got ticked off and came back alone, without them. They didn’t come back home till the evening. Their muzzles were covered in blood. So now I had a deer on my conscience. Have you ever seen a deer’s eyes when it’s dying? Like in a snare or a trap, for instance. You’ll never see such terror in any other eyes.

Let me tell you, when crowds of people start arriving here in high season, I sometimes have the feeling that I live in a different world from them. I won’t deny it, their world is pleasant, cheerful, maybe even happy, I can’t say, but I don’t think I’d be capable of living in it. You’re convinced that I actually do live in it? But how can
I
be sure of that? I mean, even with the sun, everyone has to have their own, their own sunrises and sunsets. I lived abroad for all those
years, but wherever I was living, whenever I wanted to have a sunrise or sunset I always had to have it according to the sunrises and sunsets here. That was always the measure of any sunrise or sunset. The only measure, wherever I was.

It’s another matter that especially in the big cities you can live your whole life and not see a sunrise or a sunset. How does the day begin? It just gets light. Then when night falls, a million lights are lit. It’s not really night at all. They just call it that. True, here too I no longer know where the sun used to come up or where it went down. It doesn’t rise in the same place, or set in the same place it used to. I get up with it, but I’m never sure, it didn’t used to rise in that place. That’s why I don’t know how you found me, since I can never seem to find myself. Admittedly, finding yourself is no easy task. Who knows if it isn’t the hardest of all the tasks people face in the world.

No, Mr. Robert’s cabin isn’t for sale, I already mentioned that. At least not until Mr. Robert tells me so. If I were you, I’d go for number thirty-one. There aren’t many cabins as nice as thirty-one. It has a fireplace, electric heating, double-glazed windows, insulated walls, you can even live there in the winter. Two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down, both tiled, with boilers. And it’s all in oak. Carpeted floors. There used to be antlers, but fortunately the guy took them with him.

I’d advise against antlers. You couldn’t live with them. The walls were covered in antlers. Wherever you turned there were antlers. In the main rooms, the kitchen, the bathrooms. Over the front door there was the head of a wild boar with tusks this big. Not one single wall was empty. Whenever I went over there to check everything was in order I had to be careful not to get jabbed by an antler, because some of the bigger ones stuck out all the way into the middle of the room. I’m telling you, every now and then I’d sit down in an armchair, because sometimes I like to sit awhile in one or other of the cabins, he had these nice big leather armchairs, but something made me want to leave right away. He built the cabin as a place to keep the antlers. Apparently his wife had made him remove them from their apartment because there was no more room
to put anything else up. No, she never came here. Whereas him, he’d be here every Saturday and Sunday. He didn’t go sunbathing or swimming, he rarely even went on a walk, he’d just sit for days on end in his cabin. He often came in the winter too. And the strangest thing of all, imagine this, was that he didn’t hunt. Those weren’t hunting trophies. He did have a shotgun. Though what he needed it for I couldn’t say. How can you enter someone’s soul through antlers?

Then all at once, I couldn’t tell you what had happened, one day he arrived in a truck with two hired guys, took the antlers away, and put the cabin up for sale. Some people said he’d found a good buyer for the antlers, others that he’d thrown them on the trash heap. The truth may have been something else again, though I can’t imagine what.

You should think about it. He’s not asking much. A cabin like that is worth twice the price. What would you do here? Well, what do I do? Especially if you were to come here once or twice a year, in the off-season. I could even plant more beans. If we didn’t feel like shelling beans we could go for a walk in the woods. We could listen to music, I brought a lot of records. No, I don’t play chess. You like to play? I somehow never learned. I had no patience for it. When I lived abroad I sometimes used to play bridge, but for bridge you need four people. When I worked on building sites, when we weren’t drinking vodka, once in a blue moon we’d play cards. We’d play one thousand,
durak
, sixty-six, also blackjack or poker.

Before that, at school we’d play the matchbox game. Do you know it? You’ve never even heard of it? It’s very simple. You take a matchbox, it has to be full, and you put it on the edge of the table, lying flat, so it sticks out over the edge, though not too far or it’ll fall off. Then you flip it up with your index finger. You get points depending on how it lands on the table. The most number of points is when it lands upright, in other words on the smallest side, where you take out the matches. We’d always say that was worth ten points, though you can agree on a different score. Five points for the scratchboard, on either side. You
know what the scratchboard is? Where you strike the match. And no points if it landed on its big side.

Oh, the game wasn’t as innocent as you imagine. There are no innocent games. Everything depends not on what you’re playing, but what you’re playing for. We played innocently when our homeroom teacher would come by. At those times we didn’t even write down the points. He collected matchboxes and almost every evening he came to see if we’d used up all the matches from yesterday’s box. Later I’ll tell you why he collected them. Sometimes he’d just sit there endlessly. There were times when we’d have to pretend we were getting ready for bed, otherwise he’d have stayed forever. One of us would start unbuttoning his shirt, another untied his shoes, someone else turned his bed down. Then when he finally went, probably thinking we were all about to get into our beds, we’d check the hallway one more time to make sure he’d left the building, and only then would we start to play for real.

Not for money. We didn’t have any money. Sometimes those who knew how to remove a wallet from a pocket had a bit. Not for cigarettes. We smoked cherry leaves, clover, other disgusting things. The game was about not coming last. You’re surprised the stakes were so low. Then let me say this: what was remarkable was that the stakes were so high. There was only one loser, however many of us were playing, and it was the one who got the lowest score. He then became the victim of all the other players. We could do whatever we liked with him, and he had to do what he was told to do. In other words, the game wasn’t about winning, like all other games, where that’s the whole point. The point of this game, as I said, was not to come in last. What it meant to be last, well, the best indication was that some of them would burst into tears. Some people would try to run away, but there was no way you could get away when there were so many winners. Other losers would try and buy off the rest with all sorts of promises. But no one could be bought. Some of them even reached for their knives. But that didn’t help much either. When there are too many winners, tears and knives are useless. Just one time, one kid managed to escape. But he also never came
back to the school ever. He’d had a feeling he was going to come out last and before the game was over he jumped through the window, which was closed, he smashed the pane with his head as if he was leaping into a pool of water.

But I have to say that we always played fair. None of the players kept track of the score. One boy was chosen as scorekeeper, and he got a pencil and a sheet of paper and no one was allowed to look at it. You can imagine the excitement once the game finished. Not who had won, but who was last.

There was one kid once who came last, he took it calmly but he said that first he had to go to the latrine. If we didn’t trust him, we could go with him. We went. The latrine was in a corner of the parade ground, a little ways behind the barracks. I don’t know if you know what a latrine like that looks like. It’s a pit about as deep as the height of a person, maybe a bit more. I don’t remember them ever emptying it, so it could have been deeper. It was about as wide as from you to the wall, and long enough for a dozen or more people to sit at the same time. There were two horizontal poles, you sat on the lower one and leaned your back against the other one. They were thick things, and they were propped up by struts so they wouldn’t break. Around the latrine there was a solid high enclosure made of planking. I could stand on tiptoe and reach up my hand and still not be able to touch the top. Of course, I was a lot smaller then. There was a roof raised a foot and a half or so above the walls, to allow for ventilation. Though when it rained, it was hard to find a place on the pole where the rain didn’t come in. And when it was really pouring, you could do your business on the fly, as they say, but you still got soaked.

The latrine was the only place you could go to talk, complain, curse, confide in each other, tell your woes, or every often even cry. Everywhere else, whenever a few people gathered together, however quietly they talked or even, God forbid, whispered, immediately someone would squeal. Whispers were the most suspicious of all. And they’d get hauled in right away.

“So what are these secrets of yours? We don’t have any secrets here. Secrets
are a selfish relic of old ways. And school isn’t just about teaching you a trade, but how to behave as well. Out with it.”

And you’d have to make something up on the spot. It goes without saying there were informers among us. But how could we tell who it was? I mean, they didn’t exactly have “snitch” stamped on their foreheads. Even if you suspected one or another kid, he could still have been innocent. Whereas in your wildest dreams you’d never imagine it could be the guy who slept in the bunk above you or below you. He even hid under the blanket when he crossed himself.

Of course, you had to be careful in the latrine as well. Everyone would drop their pants whether they needed to go or not, and we’d all sit on the pole, while one guy would keep guard outside, his fly undone like he’d just finished. You should remember that back then flies were button-up, and fastening three or four buttons took longer than the zippers you have today. If someone we didn’t trust came along, the kid outside would tip us off by whistling or coughing, then he’d start to button himself up. So when the person came into the latrine he wouldn’t see anything wrong, because we’d all just be sitting there on the pole grunting away, often more than we needed to.

So anyway, the loser of the game said he had to use the latrine. We went with him. He unbuttoned his pants, sat down on the pole, there was no way anyone could have known it was just a trick. All of a sudden he slid off the pole and began to drop down into the pit. He didn’t shout out for us to save him, because he had no intention of drowning. He just wanted to dunk himself in so he’d stink. He was quite right in thinking no one would want to come near anyone who stank like that, and none of the winners would order him to do anything. Even after he washed. After something like that getting rid of the smell is easier said than done, even if you take a bath every day. Plus he was fully dressed, wearing his boots. It would take the longest time for the smell to go away.