A Treatise on Shelling Beans (22 page)

Sometimes she’d wear her braid up on her head in a bun. Maybe it was for self-protection, because how else can you protect yourself when you’ve got the kind of braid that just begs to be grabbed and held for at least a moment. Or perhaps she wanted to look nicer, who can tell. Though in my book she had no need to look nicer. Without the braid, though, she looked quite different,
she became kind of unapproachable, haughty. When she put the bowl or the plate in front of you, she seemed to be doing you a favor. I didn’t like the bun. I thought to myself, when she’s my wife I’ll tell her I prefer the braid. With the braid, when it swung back and forth behind her back she looked, I don’t know how to put it, like she’d only just risen into the world.

You’re smiling … my imagination’s a bit old-fashioned, right? But that was how I felt back then. Though if you think about it, don’t you reckon we continue to imagine things the way people have imagined them? However much the world changes. However different we are. Or maybe we just pretend to be different so we can keep up with the world. While in our innermost longings we’re all still the same, we just hide it from ourselves and the rest of the world.

Besides, tell me yourself, can anyone imagine nicer hair on a girl than a braid? Naturally, for a braid like that you need a mass of hair, and not the thin kind. You need hair that’s a gift, as they used to say in my childhood. Here, on the lake, in the season, when people come on a Saturday or Sunday or on vacation, you sometimes see nice hair. But it’s best not to look too closely. It’s all dyed, and often colors that you never see in real hair. Real hair has a different color on each person, have you ever noticed that? In addition to which, their hair looks like it’s been all puffed up by hairdressers, with all those conditioners and shampoos and gels. Often their heads look like bunches of flowers. And the whole bunch could fit in your hand if you plucked it from their head.

In general, something wrong is going on with people’s hair. Maybe it’s a sign that something bad is starting to happen in the world? Despite what you might think, more often than not the beginning is hard to spot. It’s rare for anything to start with big things or big events. It’s usually from something little, often something insignificant, like people’s hair for example. But have you noticed that more and more young men are bald? And they’re getting younger and younger. When I was their age everyone had a shock of hair.

When you only look at people’s hair, or for example only at their bare feet, for instance here at the lake, or only at their hands, their eyes, their mouths, their
eyebrows, you see them altogether differently than when you look at them as a whole. It gives you all kinds of insights. It gives you lots to think about.

It was that braid of hers that was the start of what came next. Though no one suspected it could be the braid. A braid is just a braid. It was tempting to grab it and feel it, that was all. Though let me tell you, when it sometimes accidentally brushed against my face as she was clearing plates from the table, it gave me goose bumps, as if death had brushed against me. Though I couldn’t have imagined her with any other hair.

Actually, there was something odd about her in general. When they took hold of her braid she’d always blush, when she should have been accustomed to it by then. She’d served so many meals, there’d been so many lunches since the building site was set up, she ought to have gotten used to it. But she blushed even when someone just looked her in the eye when she was bringing the plates. She’d blush whenever someone said, You look nice today, Miss Basia, or Basieńka. She always looked nice, but they’d say that to her. I mean, there just aren’t that many words you can use when you want to say something nice to a girl, especially in a cafeteria, when she’s giving you your soup or your main course or clearing the dishes away.

It’s another matter that as far as words are concerned, something has happened between men and women, don’t you think? Someone here said to me once that words are unnecessary, that they’re dying out. It’s obvious what a man is, what a woman is, what do you need words for. True or false ones, wise or unwise, elegant or clumsy, either way they all lead without exception to the same thing. So what are they for?

True, on the building sites things weren’t that great either when it came to words. You used them as much as was needed on the construction. And you can imagine what kinds of words they were mostly. One job followed another, so you just dropped by the cafeteria to quickly eat your lunch and then hurry back to work. You were dirty and sweaty, you didn’t even wash your hands sometimes. Plus, while you were eating there were other men waiting for your
place the moment you were done. Where could you be expected to learn other words? You look nice today, Miss Basia, or Basieńka, that was all some of them could manage. And those were the ones we reckoned knew how to talk. It was much simpler to just grab hold of her braid.

Were any of them in love with her? I can’t speak for the others. Probably all of them would gladly have gone to bed with her. But were any of them in love with her? As far as true love is concerned, not many people are capable of that, as you know. It’s hard to find, especially on a building site.

The construction wasn’t finished, it was three quarters done at most, when here the machinery started arriving from abroad, in accordance with the plan. Soon after that a crew came to install it, including a couple of men who worked for the foreign company that had sent the machinery. It looked like they wouldn’t have a whole lot to do for the moment, but they suddenly got all busy. They told us to quickly finish off one of the shops, and began installing some of the machines. Luckily for us they had to redo the measurements, because something had come out wrong, they even had to redraw their plans, and that gave us time to catch up with our own schedule. They were constantly sitting around the table in management, adjusting, arguing, threatening, saying it was supposed to be this way and not that.

They were classy guys. Every second one was a qualified engineer. A whole separate barracks was prepared for them to stay in. They even started calling it a pavilion instead of a barracks. They plastered the outside, painted the interior, weather-stripped it, put in new doors and windows. Each of them had his own room. Those of us who’d been living in that barracks before, they moved us to private lodgings, cramming seven or eight guys into one room. They bought the newcomers shiny new furniture, big wide beds, plus sofas, armchairs, wardrobes, tables, stools, bookshelves, bedside tables, night lights, lace curtains in the windows, drapes. There weren’t many private homes that were as nice as those rooms. Also, in each room there was a radio, a rug on the floor, a mirror on the wall.

When we lived in that barracks, we had iron bunk beds and one wardrobe between six of us. The most you could do was hang your suit in there if you had one. You kept the rest of your things in a suitcase under your bed, or in old cookie boxes or cigarette cartons. No one would have dreamed of putting drapes on our windows, let alone lace curtains. It was difficult enough to get your turn at the soap or the towel. We bought a piece of calico and hung it over the window on nails at night. Or a mirror. The only mirrors were in the shared bathroom, nearly all of them cracked. Most of the time you had to use a cracked mirror to shave, brush your hair, or for example to squeeze your zits, or tie your necktie on a Sunday. And if you just wanted to take a look at yourself, you looked like you were made of broken pieces like the mirror. In the cafeteria they gave the new guys a separate area by the windows – that was where they had their tables. However late they came, those tables were always free and waiting for them. No one else dared sit there. There were times when all the other tables were occupied, and however big of a hurry you were in, because you were in the middle of an urgent job, you still had to wait till someone finished eating, even though those other tables were free. And often it wasn’t just one or two of us, there’d be a dozen or more guys hovering over the ones who were eating. We’d even tell them to get a move on, eat faster, as a result of which some of them would deliberately draw out their meal. It was infuriating, here your stomach was rumbling, here there was work to do, and right in front of you there were empty tables, almost taunting you. On top of that, often they only showed up when the last men were eating, any number of us could have eaten at their tables in the meantime. It sometimes happened that someone couldn’t wait and went back to work without getting their lunch. At most they’d grab some herring or an egg from the snack bar, or a bit of sausage, though they didn’t often have sausage, and they’d go back to work still half hungry.

And just imagine, she fell in love with one of the guys from those tables. In front of everyone, on the very first day. He came in, sat down, and she served him his soup. He looked at her, and she didn’t blush, she just looked back at
him. For a moment they looked at each other like that, and the whole cafeteria stopped eating for a second. Even if someone was lifting a spoonful of soup to their mouth, or a fork with potatoes or meat, they froze and watched. All the time they’d been grabbing her braid and saying, You look nice today Miss Basia, or Basieńka, and here some complete stranger had shown up and she wasn’t even blushing.

He was holding his spoon also, but he hadn’t yet put it in his soup, as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her as she stood over him, or maybe he’d lost his appetite. She couldn’t take her eyes off him either. Even though she’d put his soup down in front of him and she should have gone away, the way she’d go away from each of us after she put our soup down. She only snapped out of it when the cook leaned through the kitchen hatch and shouted:

“Basia, don’t just stand there! These bowls need taking!”

She said to him:

“I hope you like it.”

She’d never said that to any of us.

He said:

“Thank you. I’m sure I will.”

And he watched her walk away, right till she reached the hatch. He ate his soup, but it was like he wasn’t eating. It was
krupnik
, barley soup, I remember. Do you like krupnik? Me, I can’t stand it. Ever since I was a kid I’ve hated it. Eating a bowl of krupnik was torture for me. Then she brought him the main course, and he didn’t so much as glance at the plate. He took her braid in his hand, but not the way the others would grab hold of it. Rather, he lifted it up on his outspread palm as if he was weighing it to see if by any chance it was made of gold. She didn’t snatch it back the way she did with the other men.

“Where on earth do braids like this grow?” he said.

Which of us would have known to say something like that, where do braids like that grow. But she didn’t blush. She looked at him as if it was all the same to her what he did with her braid, as if she’d let him do anything he wanted with it.
He could have wrapped it around his neck, he could have cut himself a length of it, he could have unbraided it, she wouldn’t have pulled it away. She only said:

“Please eat, sir. Your food’ll get cold.”

He said:

“I like cold food.”

That was another way he was different from the rest of us, none of us would have said we liked cold food. With us, if something wasn’t hot enough we’d make a fuss about it on the spot:

“Why is this soup cold? These potatoes look like leftovers! What kind of meat is this, it’s bad enough it’s offcuts! Miss Basia, tell them in the kitchen there! Take my plate back, have them heat it up!”

Whereas he’d said he liked cold food. He was on a building site, in the cafeteria, and he liked cold food. I don’t know if anyone enjoyed their meal that day. I couldn’t even tell you what the main course was. Probably meatballs, because we mostly got meatballs. They were more breadcrumbs than meat, but they were called meatballs.

You probably think she drove a dagger into my heart, as they say. Well, it did hurt. I didn’t finish my main course. I went back to work. Though I didn’t much feel like working either. In the end I made myself feel better by saying I’d wait him out. They’d install all the machinery in the cold storage plant and he’d leave, and I’d still be there. I just had to be patient. Besides, I found it hard to believe it could have happened just like that on the first day. She’d given him his soup and his main course, and that was that.

But from that day she changed beyond recognition. She looked and she didn’t see. Even when you said to her, Good morning, Miss Basia, or Basieńka, sometimes she didn’t answer. When she gave us our plates it seemed like it was all the same to her which of us was which. She knew the cafeteria like the back of her hand, she could have found her way among the tables blindfold, but she began to make mistakes. The next table had been waiting longer than us, but she served us first. She’d never gotten the order wrong before. She knew
virtually to the second who had arrived first, who had sat where. The opposite happened too. We’d be calling, over here, Miss Basia, or Basieńka, we were here before them. She’d give us a distracted glance and serve the guys who’d come after us. Or she’d bring the main course to a table where they hadn’t had their soup yet, while there were other men waiting for their main course at a table that was even closer to her.

It’s possible to fall in love at first sight, but to that extent? It was enough to see what happened when he showed up in the cafeteria. If she was carrying bowls or plates to some table, the tray would shake in her hands, the plates would clink, then when she served them it was like she wanted to chuck them all down at once. And right away she’d run to the hatch for his soup. He’d still be eating the soup and already she’d be bringing him his main course. While us, when we finished our soup we always had to wait for the main course till she was done serving everyone their soup. Sometimes we’d even tap our forks against our bowls because we’d been waiting too long for the main course. Him, he never had to wait.

You should have seen her when he didn’t show up at the usual time. You’d have thought it wasn’t her that was serving the meals, her hands were doing the job all alone. As for her, she didn’t even see what her hands were carrying. She was just one big tormented waiting mass. Here she’d be putting plates down on the tables, but her eyes would be fixed on the door. I’m telling you, when you ate you could virtually feel that torment of hers in the spoons and forks and knives.