A Treatise on Shelling Beans (43 page)

We practiced several times, and each time he corrected something in my greeting. Then in the middle of one of the practice runs, before we’d had time to greet each other, it was like he suddenly woke up, he came to a halt, winced winced a little as if from shame and said:

“Hand me the hat, please.” He took the newspaper out. “Honestly, what am I teaching you here!” He put the hat back in the display, taking out the dull-colored one he’d put there in its place. “I’m going to the dogs. I’m not myself. What I’ve been showing you is an embarrassment. A hat lined with newspaper. At one time that would have been unthinkable. A greeting was a greeting, a ritual so to speak. You’d think I was trying to deprive you of all the pleasure of wearing a hat. I find it hard to even imagine you greeting a lady with a hat lined with newspaper. It’s another matter that there are no ladies anymore either. They’ve all died off or flown away. Times aren’t good for ladies either, so to speak. And if you walk down the street, you can see what’s happened on the street also. You get elbowed, trodden on almost, and no one even apologizes. I rarely go out these days. Just to and from the shop. Not to mention what people wear on their heads. I try not to look. Have you noticed how ugly the world has gotten? So what that it exists? I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of the world, not just its existence. It’s too big for you, it’s too big. Not to mention that it’s rejecting your face.”

He opened a drawer under the counter, took out a thick notebook and almost tossed it over to me at the end of the counter.

“Please, write that you’d like a brown felt hat, in your size.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s the requests and complaints book. Though I’d not use my own name if I were you. Just sign it: A client. I tell everyone the same.” He picked the notebook up and turned the pages fretfully. “It’s almost full. What people haven’t written in here. See, there’s a poem. And a picture, though it’s dirty, very dirty, don’t look at that page. OK, here’s an empty page. Please. Please. You really must.”

“What am I supposed to write?”

“Whatever you like. If you don’t want a hat, you can write whatever you’d like to have. Clients write all sorts of things. Not just about hats. I never tell anyone what they should write. Either way I’ll never show it to the inspectors. For them I have another book. This one, see.” He took another notebook out of a different drawer. He flipped the pages and put it in front of me. “This one’s empty, as you see. Nothing but stamps and signatures to say it’s been checked. Whereas in that one, anyone can write anything they want. Because who are the clients supposed to write to? God? What if God doesn’t know our language? Because if He did, if He did …” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes, his nose, his forehead. “I’m so sorry. In the midst of all this I forgot that it’s thanks to you I have light.” He stuffed one notebook into one drawer, the other into the other. “I’m thinking about it … But no, no. It’s too big, it really is too big. I knew the moment you walked in that it wasn’t your size. I was even worried, because not only was it on display, but that would be the one you wanted, a brown felt hat, I could tell right away. At first glance, so to speak. The first glance usually tells us the most about someone. When that first glance of ours strikes against their face, and for a split second it becomes sort of dazzled, fully open, so to speak. So the moment you came in, my first glance told me everything about you. What could it possibly have said? Well, it told me your coming here was the kind of coincidence that sometimes turns malicious and changes into destiny. That’s right, that’s right, young man, destiny is no more than a particularly malicious coincidence there’s no longer any getting away from. You came in here despite the fact that I don’t have any brown felt hats in your size. You may not have known I didn’t have any, true. But you’re not aware of why you’re so set on brown felt. It’s not that you want something that isn’t there. Though young people have the right to want what isn’t there, even things that are impossible. Nor is it important that a brown felt hat wouldn’t be right for your young face. That’s not the point. The point is that you’re passing yourself by, so to speak. You’re walking past yourself and you don’t recognize that it’s you. I’d hoped you might go for the cream-colored one. But you scorned it. Against your own best
interests. In discord with yourself. Then who are you? An electrician, you say. You work on a building site. You fixed the light in here, so that would confirm your story. Let it be so. I can see you have a young face, not fully hatched, so to speak. Let it be so. True, young faces are usually the hardest, in that a young face virtually by its nature is still unfinished. It’s in constant flux, it brightens and darkens in turn. You think you’ve managed to grasp something permanent in it, then all at once it evades you, vanishes, the face you see before you keeps changing. But I’m absolutely certain that in your face I was able to grasp something. Namely, that in you nothing quite fits, so to speak. That you’re the wrong size for yourself, in yourself even. And you’re the wrong size for the one brown felt hat in the shop – not the other way around. Being the wrong size is your calling, so to speak, the hallmark of your existence, as revealed in the oh-so-malicious coincidence that there’s only the one brown felt hat, and it happens to be on display, and I can’t take it down from the display. Plus, it’s too big for you. Everything in you is the wrong size that can possibly be the wrong size in a person. Which is to say, it’s too big. To put it simply, you feel strange within yourself, you bump up against yourself inside, so to speak, you don’t match up with yourself. The thing is, though, that you can’t line yourself with newspaper, young man. Although who knows, who knows, these days the impossible sometimes becomes possible. In a word, in yourself you feel like that hat on your head, but in reverse. As if something were carrying you along and giving you an ever-changing shape, sometimes even blowing you away in the wind. I don’t know why I’m saying all this to you. I’ve always been touched by younger clients. Especially since the state took over the shop and I’ve had a lot more time to think about things. Believe me, I can stare at a young face the way you stare at a painting. And even when no one young comes in for weeks on end, I can imagine such a face. The barely marked features that won’t firm up enough to reveal the still distant shadow of death. Because death is the most exact measure of youth, old age doesn’t need any measure. Youth is a state of weightlessness so to speak, the only one in your whole life. How can it be measured then, if
not with death. There is no other measure, since a young person needn’t even be aware of the fact that they’re young. True, awareness always comes too late, regardless of age. That’s the nature of our fate as humans, that it’s always too late. Always when everything’s already over. Because it’s awareness that is our fate, not life. Whether our life was worth the living or whether it really might not have been – that’s only decided by fate. Life is what goes on disconnectedly, without purpose, day after day, most often at the whim of chance, that since we’re here we have to be here. Whereas people have made fate out to be a kind of validation of life. And it’s only the short time of youth that allows us to see what a happy eternity could look like. So many years, so many years among these hats, and youth still awes me – me, an old hat seller. Especially when a young person is buying a hat for the first time in their life. This is your first hat, right? I thought so. I knew it the moment you walked in. Pardon me for asking, but how long have you been an electrician?”

“Since right after I left school. I first started work during the electrification of the countryside.” I was getting ready to leave, my fingers were already on the door handle, but I was held back by his question.

“I see,” he said.

I didn’t have the courage to ask what he could see, because it seemed to me there wasn’t anything to see.

“Why did you leave that job?” he asked.

“The pay was bad,” I said. But there was something else in his question. It was like he knew I’d left because of the saxophone. To mislead him, I went on: “Rain or no, frost or no, you had to sit perched up on those poles –”

He didn’t let me finish.

“How long have you been at your present site?”

“I just got my first wages.”

“OK, now I understand everything.” There was a clear note of dejection in his voice. “At such a young age, at such a young age a brown felt hat …” He went up to the display, took down the hat and said as he handed it to me: “Try
it on again.” Then he went behind the counter, sat down, rested his head on his hands and didn’t say another word.

The hat was much too big. It seemed to fall even further over my ears than before. When I shook my head it wobbled. When I went up to the mirror, it looked too big. When I stepped back, it was still too big. All the same, I stood in front of the mirror waiting for him to confirm it: “See, it’s too big. Too big. You must have finally realized it yourself.”

But since I heard no word from him, I took the hat off and put it right by him on the counter. At that moment he asked unexpectedly:

“Will you wear it, or shall I wrap it for you?”

No, I wasn’t pleased, as you might think. I’d realized I had no choice. And I said:

“Wrap it, please.”

Let me tell you, it was the longest journey of my life. The one to buy the hat, I mean. Counting both going there and coming back. I sometimes have the feeling it’s still going on. Since then I’ve traveled by plane, ship, express train, I even flew in a helicopter once, but it seems to me I never traveled that long. True, it was just a regular slow train. I don’t know if you know what it meant to travel in those kinds of trains back then. Not only did it pull in at every station, every little halt, even places where there wasn’t so much as a shelter to mark the fact that it was a stop. On top of that it would often be held up by the signals, or come to a standstill for no apparent reason at some random spot. Often it hadn’t even had time to get up to full speed and already it was stopping again.

How many miles was it? Probably not all that many. Besides, it all depends how you measure it. I measured it by the hat I’d gone to buy. I left at dawn, and the previous evening we’d been drinking till late, because I had to buy myself into the good graces of the guys at the new job, the people I was working with, and especially the master craftsmen and the overseers. I was tired and I was hoping I’d get some sleep in the train. But I kept thinking about the hat, wondering if I’d find the kind I wanted, and I didn’t sleep a wink. So I was counting on getting some shut-eye on the return journey.

The man in the shop advised me to go to the smaller station where the train originated, that way I’d be sure to have a seat. I managed to find a compartment all to myself. I curled up in the corner by the window, putting the hat on the shelf over my head. I began to feel drowsy right away. I don’t know if I actually fell asleep. I was overwhelmed by everything I’d heard from the man in the shop. I was puzzled most of all as to why, when he handed me the screw that I hadn’t even dropped, like I told you, he asked out of the blue:

“Do you play an instrument?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you won’t understand this. Me, when I was young I learned the cello a bit. Later I opened my own shop and my hats took up all my time. It was only after my wife passed away that I went back to playing. Today I couldn’t make it through the day if I didn’t have the hope of picking up my cello when I come home in the evening. It’s not exactly playing, I just mess around a bit. Ah, the cello,” he sighed. “It can resonate with the tenderest strings inside you. It’s as if what’s deepest, most mysterious, is concealed in the sounds. Every evening, so long as nothing gets in the way, of course. Though there’s nothing left to get in my way anymore, so to speak. It’s like I live only for those evenings. I come here, sit, supposedly selling hats, but every so often I take out my watch and count how many hours I still have to go till evening.” He actually took a big “turnip” pocket watch on a chain from the pocket of his vest. Remember, they used to call pocket watches turnip watches. “Still a long, long time to go,” he said in a disappointed voice. “At home, wintertime is worst of all. With every breath you puff out a cloud of steam. Because the coal rations they give you are pathetic. But I’m not complaining. I put on woolen gloves with the tips cut off, I wrap my legs in a blanket, put a woolen balaclava on, though you’re not supposed to wear anything on your head indoors. Over the balaclava I put a hat, and I play. I try not to miss a single evening. I couldn’t forgive myself. When words are no use, thoughts are no use, and the imagination won’t imagine anything anymore, all that’s left is music. All that’s left is music in this world, in this life.”

So I half-slept, in between my lack of sleep from the night of drinking and his question about whether I played an instrument. It was no kind of sleep, as you can imagine. The moment your eyes close, you wake up again.

After ten or fifteen minutes of this semi-sleep the train pulled into the main station where it officially started its journey. A crowd of people rushed to climb on board, and as I’m sure you know, in those days each compartment had doors on both sides of the car. At that point sleep was out of the question. Not just sleep. You couldn’t even think anymore. And now I had to watch out for my hat as well. Plus, you know how it is with a person’s thoughts in a train. They break off at the clatter of the wheels. And when the train goes over a switch, any thought you have is torn to shreds. The same happens at the stations, because either you look out the window, or someone asks what station it is. Not to mention people almost always talk in the train.

In the meantime more and more people joined the train, while very few got out. At each station it was like people were only getting on, not off. Getting on, that’s how you can say it today. Back then they jostled and elbowed their way on, all of them at the same time. Plus, they were lugging bundles, bags, suitcases, baskets, packages, sacks, the compartment almost burst its seams. The conductors had to use the door to push people in so the compartment would close. And it was like that at every station. You’d have thought the train wasn’t powerful enough to be carrying all those people and that was why it was barely inching along, stopping all the time, often in the middle of nowhere. And at the stations it stopped forever, so it was getting more and more delayed. At times it had to wait till a train coming from the other direction passed through and freed up the line. I’m telling you, I actually sort of felt sorry for the train for having to carry a burden that seemed beyond its strength.