A Treatise on Shelling Beans (51 page)

So you can imagine how I felt now. At one time I’d played for money thrown into a basket, but still I’d been playing. Now I was throwing money into other people’s baskets, while I myself had no hope. Plus, I could see him before me, inching along on his crutches, facing the prospect of being in a wheelchair. Yes, he was already in a wheelchair when I played in his club. Let me tell you, I felt like I was waiting for a sentence to be passed, especially since for the longest time there was no improvement. I even seemed to be worse. So you can understand that I had to forget about the saxophone. It goes without saying that I kept visiting the sanatorium just as the doctor had instructed, but by then I was afraid to drive a car, so I used to take the train.

One year I was traveling to the sanatorium, the train pulled up at some small station, and a moment later a woman appeared in the doorway. Normally it made no difference to me who sat in my compartment, but she riveted my attention from the first. I jumped up to help her put her suitcase on the shelf, though at that time, with those hands of mine that had no strength in them, I might not have managed. I myself had to get other people to help me. Luckily someone closer to the door beat me to it. She was more or less middle-aged, though as you know, that age is the hardest to pin down. She was dressed smartly and with good taste. She radiated a mature beauty that was beginning to wane. Or the impression may have come from an intensity of being that suffused her beauty and drew out its depths. Faces, even young ones, that are merely good-looking are only so on the outside as it were, till the intensity of being reveals that extra something in them. But that wasn’t what took possession of me, though it wouldn’t have been surprising if it had been that alone. The thing was, the longer I looked at her, surreptitiously of course, the more certain I was that we’d met once before. But where and when – I racked my brains. It even occurred to me that she might have been the woman in the black veil covered in tiny knots of lace like little flies, as we were standing around the pile of dry
potato stalks in the dream. I spent the whole of the rest of the journey trying to remember.

She got off at the same station as me. On the platform I nodded goodbye, investing the gesture with all of my feeling of regret that we’d probably never meet again. I doubt she read it that way. She nodded back without the faintest smile. So I was all the more certain that was the last time I’d see her.

Then one day, would you believe it, I was sitting on a bench in the park smoking a cigarette, I look up and all of a sudden I see her coming towards me. She was dressed differently, more the way you do at a sanatorium, more casually, but with equally good taste. I recognized her from far off. She’d been constantly in my thoughts since the time we’d shared a compartment on the train. Often, in between procedures I found myself wondering where we could have met and when, that I should know her at once like that. She came up to the bench I was sitting on. She didn’t so much as smile to show she remembered me. She simply asked if she could sit down, because she felt like a cigarette, and she saw I was smoking.

“No one else is smoking on any of the other benches,” she said. After she finished her cigarette, as she was about to leave she said: “Thank you.”

That was all. Again I tried to figure out where I knew her from. Because by now I had no doubt it had been a long, long time before the train. In the park, in the sunshine you could see a lot more clearly, you could see as if from the most distant time. But how long ago it could have been, I strained to recall. I smoked one cigarette after another. One by one, as if looking through a photo album I went through all the women I’d ever known, but I didn’t find her. Perhaps she’d been much younger then, perhaps she’d changed a lot. Yet that intensity of being must have marked her beauty even back then, because that must have been how I remembered her.

A few days later, after my walk I stopped by a cafe. I was sitting there drinking my coffee and reading a newspaper when something made me glance up.
The cafe was packed, all the tables were taken, and here I see her coming into the place the way she’d come into the compartment in the train. She took a few steps, looking around for a free table. Without thinking I followed her gaze, but it didn’t seem as if any table would be available for a while. It didn’t occur to me to invite her to sit at my table. I was probably afraid she’d say no, since on the bench in the park she hadn’t seen fit to even smile, let alone ask if we hadn’t once shared a train compartment. That’s right, I remember you, she could have said. I buried myself in my newspaper again. All at once I heard her voice right next to me:

“Would you mind if I sat at your table? All the other seats are taken. One might free up soon, so it won’t be for long.”

“You’re welcome to,” I said, perhaps a little too stiffly. It was just that I resented the fact that back then, on the bench, she hadn’t recognized me as the person she’d shared a compartment with. Now it would have been easier to start a conversation. Yet I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything to talk about with her, while it would have been wrong to continue reading my paper. As you know, though, women have a preternatural gift for seeing through things, even when you hide it deep down. Before sitting she hesitated and asked:

“Or perhaps you’re expecting someone? If that’s the case …”

“You’re welcome to sit,” I repeated, much more warmly this time. And in the way of the few words one has to utter at such moments, and which as it happened she’d already put in my mouth, once she took her seat I added half-jokingly: “Though the truth is, we may always be expecting someone, even if we’re not always fully aware of it.”

She was visibly embarrassed.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She was all set to jump up again.

“Please, sit here,” I said to stop her. “I was just talking in generalities.”

“In that case, I’ll have some cake and be going,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, though I shouldn’t,” she added apologetically.

In order to set her completely at ease, I said:

“In any case please don’t pay any attention to what I said, because you might not enjoy the cake, and I wouldn’t want that to be my doing. I was just talking.”

“That’s how I took it,” she said.

She still seemed uneasy, though. It showed in the nervous way she looked for the waitress, who a moment ago had disappeared into the back.

“Don’t worry, she’ll be out any minute.”

“I’m not worried,” she replied abruptly. “Why would I be …”

I had the feeling I’d touched a nerve, though I’d only meant to talk about the waitress. It may have been in an effort to make up for my faux pas, or for some other reason, that I said:

“Though we can never be sure in any situation that chance isn’t making use of us.”

“What do you mean, chance?” she asked with a start.

“For example, the fact that when you came into the cafe there weren’t any free places. Thanks to which, we’re sitting together at the same table.”

“Chance?” she repeated, as if pondering.

“Years ago, another man and I nodded to each other on the street by mistake, he took me for someone he knew and I did the same, but it turned out we didn’t know one another. I apologized to him, saying it had just been by chance. But he disagreed, and invited me to have a coffee with him.”

“Can it be that cafes turn chance into destiny? Is that what you mean?” Her tone was bantering.

“It’s possible,” I replied, giving my own voice a hint of irony, though I had no intention of being ironic. “It all depends on what we take things to be. So why should we not take it that you came here because I was expecting you.”

“Really?” She feigned surprise, but a certain wariness had appeared in her eyes.

“Would that be so impossible? So much against common sense? All the more since we actually already know one another.”

“Really?” Her eyes widened. I thought she’d burst out laughing. Yet instead she quieted down a little, as if she were thinking about it. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said after a moment. “I don’t remember you at all.”

“Surely you must. We traveled together in the same train, in the same compartment. You got on, wait a moment, what station was that …”

“That can’t be. I came here by car.”

“By car?” I wasn’t exactly surprised so much as troubled. “But you were sitting opposite me, in the seat next to the door. You had a large black suitcase. I was going to help you put it up on the shelf, but somebody else got there first.”

“I’m sorry. I never travel by train. I can’t stand trains. Coming here by train would have been too much for me. That hopeless space rushing past outside the window. Besides, I have unpleasant associations with trains.”

She had shaken my confidence a little. Yet I didn’t believe her. I sensed that she recognized me, that she was sure it was me. Perhaps she was only playing a game, the rules of which I didn’t know. Or protecting herself from something. What, though?

“But you remember that a few days ago I was sitting on a bench in the park smoking a cigarette. You came up and asked if you could join me because you also felt like smoking.”

She burst out laughing:

“I don’t smoke! Never did. You really do have me mixed up with someone else.”

“What? You mean you don’t remember?” I refused to give up. “You said that no one else on any of the benches was smoking. As you left you thanked me.”

“Perhaps after all you’d be so kind as to ask the waitress to come over,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I’d like to have my cake, then take myself off your hands.”

She gave me no hope. I wondered if I shouldn’t turn the whole thing into a joke, say, I’m sorry, I was just kidding. Sometimes I like to see how someone
will react in certain situations. But there was no doubt in my mind that it was her. I beckoned the waitress, who had just reappeared. She came up to the table.

“We’d like to see what cakes you have.”

She returned a moment later with a tray of cakes. As she held it in front of us, I asked:

“Which one would you like?”

Her eyes filled with an almost childlike delight at the sight of the cakes.

“Which do you recommend?”

I suggested the one that I usually took.

“You won’t hold it against me if I pick a different one?”

And she did. So I asked for the same one she selected. At that point she seemed to get it, a moment of musing flashed in her eyes. She smiled, though her smile seemed artificial. With a similarly artificial nonchalance, as she ate her cake with relish, she said casually:

“I’m so grateful you let me sit at your table. I had such a craving for cake today.”

“And that particular kind,” I added.

“How did you know? You couldn’t know, since you suggested a different one.”

“Out of contrariness,” I said. “Just like out of contrariness you refuse to remember that we shared a train compartment, that you sat down next to me on a bench in the park to have a cigarette. And wherever else we might have met before, you’d deny it, I know. Even if I told you you’d appeared to me in a dream, you’d deny that too, you’d say it wasn’t possible.”

“Now that, that’s possible, though it’s corny.”

“But
how
is it possible, since you claim we’ve never met before?”

“Maybe that’s the only way you could have remembered me.” She looked at me with a fixed gaze, as if the life had suddenly gone out of her eyes. For a moment we stared at one another in this way, till her smile began to return.

“You know, I think that today of all days I’ll allow myself another cake.” She
signaled to the waitress. When the latter came back with the tray of cakes, she first had me choose. Then she asked for the same kind that I picked. “You see what a pig I’m being?” she said. “I really shouldn’t. I never let myself have more than one … It’s all because of you. You’re awful. If only I’d known …” She glared at me in a mock sulk, and I saw something like a hint of alarm in her eyes. But she immediately said: “Whenever I can’t resist something, I always regret it later. I’ll have to punish myself for the second cake.”

“Punish yourself? What will your punishment be?”

“I haven’t decided yet. I’ll think of something. Oh, I know. If I come here again I’ll just order tea or coffee, I won’t have any cake at all. I’ll teach myself a lesson so I remember in the future.” She began almost savoring her self-imposed punishment. “Or no, I won’t have tea or coffee either. I’ll have them bring me a glass of water. Or I’ll be even harsher. I’ll order a cake, but I won’t eat it. I’ll leave it. Or two cakes. Yes, that’s it, two cakes, as if I were expecting someone else. And since the other person won’t come, I’ll leave both cakes uneaten.” She started to laugh, as if the punishment she was going to inflict on herself amused her greatly. “I mean, you yourself said a moment ago that we’re always expecting someone, we just don’t always know it. This way I’ll at least know. Two cakes, and I’ll leave both of them.”

I was on the point of telling her that she shouldn’t punish herself at all, what was one extra cake, it wasn’t going to hurt her. She was slim. When she came into the cafe and was standing there looking for a free table, it even struck me that she looked like an Easter palm branch. But I realized she might not know what an Easter palm branch is, and I asked if she wouldn’t like some tea or coffee, apologizing for not having thought of it before.

“No, no thank you,” she said, still laughing. “It’d spoil the taste of the cake. I never drink tea or coffee with cake, not ever.” Laughing all the time, she reached for a paper napkin. As she did so, the sleeve of her blouse pulled back and under the hem of her cuff, above the wrist, about here or a bit higher, I caught a glimpse of numbers written on her skin as if in ink or indelible pencil. It lasted a split
second. She snatched a napkin from the stand on the table and pulled down her sleeve before she put the napkin to her lips.

I ought not to have noticed it, because you shouldn’t notice everything, especially a man looking at a woman. Even in themselves people don’t always like everything. There are many things we’d like to change in ourselves. We’re at odds with many things in ourselves. We’d like to improve things in ourselves, as we would in others. But since that isn’t possible, you must admit that at least it’s less troublesome when we don’t notice it. But she evidently saw that I’d noticed, and felt obliged to say: