A Treatise on Shelling Beans

4

This time of year, the off-season, one day is pretty much like all the rest. In the morning, like anyone getting up, I wash and I put my clothes on. Though I’ll be honest with you, when I think about the fact that the whole world is getting up with me, washing, getting dressed, I sometimes feel like going back to bed and just this once not getting up, or not getting up ever again. It’s like some curse hanging over you, making you get out of bed, wash, dress every day. From all that you’d be justified in losing interest in the whole day, even though it’s only beginning, losing interest in anything that may or may not happen that day. Now imagine feeling that through your whole life. How many times have we gotten up, washed, gotten dressed — and for what?

It goes without saying that I’m talking about this side of the world, the day that’s just beginning. Because on the other side, when we’re getting up, washing, dressing, they’re undressing and washing and going to bed, which we’ll only do at the end of the day, when they’ll be doing what we did in the morning. And that’s the clearest indication the world is turning and not going anywhere.

I divide the world into two sides, but only for the morning, because by evening there aren’t any sides anymore. By evening people are all broken into little pieces, the same everywhere. Whereas in the morning people are still whole.

No, first I have to feed the dogs. They have to get their food on time. Especially in the morning. Even if I couldn’t get out of bed they’d still need to be fed. Whether I’m sick or not. They get it once in the morning then a second time in the late afternoon. When it comes time they let me know. They lie down flat and stare at me. When I wake up in the morning they’re already lying there staring.

So how can you not get up, however much you don’t feel like it or you don’t see the point. Their eyes are shining, not because they’re starving but because they’re certain they’re going to get fed. How can you not get up? Let me tell you, these days I couldn’t exist without them. I often have the feeling that without them the day would refuse to begin and refuse to end.

After that we go see what’s up with the cabins. Then it can be this or that. It varies depending on the day, though it’s mostly the same. Sometimes I’ll hop in the car and go get some groceries. That’s right, I have a car. I have to run errands from time to time. Swing by the post office or the bank once in a while. Other than that I don’t go anywhere. I don’t have anyone to visit, any place to go, any reason. Plus, there’s always something needs doing around here. The laundry, the ironing, the dishes; sweep the place out, tidy up. And even when I don’t have any other jobs, there are always the nameplates. They take up a lot of my time. Though I don’t work on them every day. Some days my hands work well, other times they hurt. I don’t have a regular daily schedule.

I start each day like I don’t expect anything of it, that it’ll bring what it brings. Though I don’t expect it to bring anything. Honestly, keeping an eye on the cabins is the only thing that gives any kind of order to the day. It’s only from the cabins that I can see the day isn’t standing still.

It’s fall now and you’d think the days would be getting shorter and shorter, but for me they get longer and longer. Often, when I wake up in the morning and think that I have to live through till evening, I feel it’s like living from birth to death all over again. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt anything like that, but it’s as if it’s harder and harder to live through the day. No, it’s not that it’s long. How shall I put it. Well, like today. It’s a day like any other, but at the same time it’s the whole of life.

In the evenings I read a bit, or listen to music. No, I hardly ever watch television. The dogs don’t like it. When I turn it on their hackles rise and they start growling. So I have to switch it off. Maybe if I played. If you ask me, nothing binds life and death together the way music does. Believe me, I played all my life, I know. That’s right, I even have three saxophones, I brought them with me. Soprano, alto, tenor. I played all three. They’re through there in the living room. You want to see? Maybe we can take a look later. Let’s finish with the beans first. I have a flute as well, and a clarinet. Sometimes I’d play piano too, when someone was needed to step in. But my instrument was the sax. Did I go to school? Depends what you mean by school. By my book I went to several, though I can’t say I have any diplomas. But do you need to sit at a desk for years to know how to do something? It’s enough that you want to know how to do it. And I wanted to ever since I was a kid.

I started on the harmonica. Got it from my Uncle Jan. One time we were sitting at the edge of the woods, under an oak tree, and uncle was playing. He was really good. He could even play tunes from the operettas. All of sudden an acorn fell on his head.

He stopped playing, looked upwards and said:

“Maybe even from this oak.”

“What about the oak?”

“That I’ll hang myself,” he said. “But for now don’t say anything to anyone.”

He put the harmonica back to his lips, but he only passed it across them without a sound, then he lost himself in thought. After which he gave me the harmonica and said:

“Here. I won’t need it anymore. It’d be a pity for it to go to waste. It was a good one.”

I asked him:

“Why don’t you want to live?”

“What can I tell you. You wouldn’t understand. You should play me something instead.”

“I don’t know how yet, uncle.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll know if you’re going to be able to learn.”

I started blowing and moving the harmonica back and forth across my lips. I couldn’t get the sounds to match up. But uncle evidently heard something:

“You’ll be able to play. Just make sure you practice.”

And that was how I began. Does that count as the start of school in your eyes? Let’s say that was only preschool. Back then they called it nursery school, not preschool. But since that oak tree I started to play. Actually, I was really determined. I played for days on end. I wanted uncle to hear me play before he hanged himself. On the pasture the cows wandered wherever they wanted, but I kept playing. When they sent me out of the house, I ran off into the woods and played there. When it was raining they’d kick me out because they couldn’t take my music any longer, so I’d just go stand under the eaves and keep playing. I’d climb trees, go as far up as I could, so they wouldn’t be able to reach me and make me come down. I’d get in a boat, drift down the Rutka, and play. I’d even go to the outhouse, latch the door shut, take out my harmonica and play. They couldn’t understand how anyone could take so long in the outhouse. Luckily the outhouse was behind the barn and they couldn’t hear me playing.

No, Uncle Jan was still alive then. It was like he was waiting to be able to hear me play. One time I saw him sitting under the same oak tree at the edge of the woods and I went up to him.

“Will you listen to me play, uncle?”

“Absolutely.” Then, as he listened he said: “I see the harmonica won’t be enough for you much longer. When the time comes you should choose the saxophone. No one here has even seen a saxophone, you’ll get asked to play all the dances and weddings. Maybe even further, higher. Saxophones are in these days. And a saxophone is the whole wide world. I’ve got nothing against fiddles, but the fiddle is a Gypsy instrument. You have to have Gypsy blood, a Gypsy soul. Roam like the Gypsies, steal like the Gypsies. A non-Gypsy will never be able to play that way. There are people in the villages play the fiddle, but they’re not real musicians. Fiddle and accordion and drums, they get together and they play everything all in the same style. One two three, one two three. They’ll never play any differently, that was always how it was here. That was how they lived, how they played, and they’d die that way. One two three, one two three. For it to change, a saxophone has to come along. Maybe when that happens they’ll start to dance differently, live differently. One time I went to a dance in the town, in the band there was a saxophone, and I’m telling you … Then I saw one just like it on display in a shop window. Next to it there was a fiddle. If I’d had the money, which I didn’t, I’d have bought it. I’d have taught myself. You can learn anything if you just set your mind to it. It cost the earth. Much more than the fiddle next to it. I don’t know how much you could get for this land of ours … I’ll leave you my share, maybe that’ll be enough. If not, then save up. Perhaps if I’d been younger … But you need to be your age to start.”

It happened that after the war I found myself in this school. It wasn’t an ordinary school. The best proof of this was the fact that the rec room, which took up a whole hut, was crammed with musical instruments. You wouldn’t believe what all they had in there. Music school? No, nothing of the sort. But trumpets, flutes, trombones, oboes, bassoons, clarinets, violins, violas, cellos, double basses. There were instruments whose names we only learned from the music teacher, once he was brought in.

There was a saxophone too, an alto. True, it was missing two keys, but you could cover the holes with your fingers and more or less play it.

Some instruments were in even worse shape. Bent, cracked, torn, they had holes from bullets and shrapnel, as if they’d fought in the war too.

But there were also ones that were perfectly fine, or at any rate that all that was needed was to solder something together or fix it back on, or stick on an extra part, or take bits from two or three of them to make one whole one, transfer something from one to another, strings for example, on something else switch out the mouthpiece, and you could play. There were shops there, so you could mess around with little repairs like that.

It turned out some people already knew how to play a little on one instrument or another. But most of them had never touched a musical instrument in their lives. Me for example, all I’d known was uncle’s harmonica. But when the music teacher showed up a short while later, he said right away that he’d make us into a band. Apparently that was the pedagogical task the school had assigned him. Fortunately he soon seemed to forget about it.

In general he didn’t make much of an effort. It was another thing that I don’t know if anyone at all could have made a band out of the ragbag of kids there were at that school. Most of the time he went around half cut, there were days he could barely stand upright. Sometimes he’d fall asleep in class. Or whenever he picked up an instrument to show us how it was played, he’d play and play, often till the end of the lesson.

We also had practice with him in the evenings in the rec room, depending on whether he showed up more or less drunk. If it was more, he’d get all sentimental about one broken instrument or another, ask how someone could have hurt it like that. Barbaric was what it was. An instrument like that suffered the way a person does. Every bullet hole, every snapped string, every chipped neck, was a wound. According to him some of the instruments had ended up in the school by mistake, they ought to have been in a museum.

But it may have been that they were brought from a museum, that they needed to be moved somewhere and it happened to be to our school. I’m sure you remember, back then everything was transported here and there and everywhere, back and forth. Not just instruments. Machinery, animals, people. Furniture, bedding, pots and pans. Sometimes we’d go down to the station and there’d be one goods train after another standing there, each one of them stuffed with all kinds of belongings. You rarely saw a passenger train, just freight trains one after another. Maybe it’s like that after every war, that everything goes back to its place, even though the war alters places too, swaps them around, while some places there’s no point looking for even, they don’t exist anymore.

One time a truck arrived and brought a harp, a harpsichord and a viola da gamba. We didn’t know what they were and we asked him, but he started crying. The harp was missing half its strings, the harpsichord only had a few keys left, and the viola da gamba looked like someone had used it for target practice. From that moment on we took a liking to him. Him alone of all the teachers. Even though like I said, usually he was tipsy or straight up drunk.

He always carried a kind of flat bottle. Here in his breast pocket. It never bothered him that he was the teacher, he’d pull it out and take a swig in front of us.

“Sorry boys, I just have to.”

All the teachers behaved like they were military, and they treated us like recruits. Aside from him they all wore uniforms without stars but with epaulettes and crossed military straps. Word had it they even carried pistols in their pockets. The students also had uniforms that were a sort of black or dark blue color, and they wore hobnailed boots, side caps, and on the side caps metal insignia with a kind of rising sun in a semicircle of rays. Which, as was explained to us in homeroom, was meant to symbolize a better new world that was rising. And that that new world was ahead of us. We just had to learn to have faith, unbreakable faith. And it was for learning faith that we were here in school.

Aside from that, we learned trades. Bricklayer, plasterer, joiner, roofer, metalworker, millworker, welder, mechanic, electrician, a few others. Everyone could choose what trade they wanted to learn. Though not entirely. In the end it came down to how many places the school had for one trade or another.

We lived in barracks, and we were divided into teams. Each team had a team leader, the oldest and strongest boy, and above him every team had its own homeroom teacher.

To begin with I learned the trumpet a bit and for a year I played reveille in the morning. After reveille we’d get washed and have breakfast — black ersatz coffee, bread and jam. Then it was assembly on the parade ground, standing in line two deep, roll call, orders. Usually a couple of kids getting reported for some wrongdoing. Then off to class, each team to a different room, or to shop. And twice a week we’d be marched off to do physical labor, carrying shovels and pickaxes, singing.

What labor did we do? There was no lack of work to be done. Especially because for several months the front had been situated in the area where the school was. We filled in bunkers and trenches and bomb craters, some of them you can’t imagine how huge. You’ve seen that kind of thing? There you go. We patched roads, at least roughly, so cars could drive there. Or we broke rocks to build more roads. We demolished ruined buildings that were in danger of collapsing. Or bridges over rivers if they were beyond being repaired. We fixed embankments that had been crushed by tanks or dug up to allow trucks and artillery through. The way it always is after a war. Come rain or shine, because as they told us, we needed to be toughened up. In winter too, it goes without saying. We cleared snow from the roads and the railroad tracks.

As far as lessons were concerned, some of the boys had attended underground school during the war. Some had even completed seventh grade. But most couldn’t either read or write. Some, even if they’d been able to once, they’d forgotten because of the war. War can make you forget lots of things, not just reading and writing. You can forget yourself. And that’s what had happened to them. They didn’t know where they were from, what they were called, where they were born, when. They were all just this postwar hodgepodge, like I said, with no homes, no fathers, mothers, and a good few with unclean consciences. Plus we were all different ages, older, younger, including some really young children. Though truth be told, no one was a child anymore. You couldn’t be a child however much you longed for your childhood.

So we weren’t entirely a school, we were part school, part youthful army. We were held accountable the way you are in the army, and for the slightest offense we’d have to run to some tree way the hell off somewhere, often carrying weights. Or wade into water up to our neck, in full uniform and boots. Or do x number of pushups. Or if it was something worse, lockup with nothing but bread and water. You’d have to report to the teachers, and you didn’t say please sir to them like in school, instead you addressed them as citizen teacher, and the commandant was citizen commandant. So we didn’t exactly feel like school students. Not many people even wanted to be promoted from one class to another. Though getting promoted didn’t make much difference. The people in charge reduced us all to the same level, they probably thought the war had set all of us back to the beginning, so they taught us from the beginning.

Maybe they were right to, because if you’d visited one of our lessons and heard us stammering out answers, or seen the scrawl in our notebooks, I don’t know if you could have told who’d had how many years of schooling versus who was just starting. For instance, for several lessons we practiced writing our signatures, because we even made mistakes writing our own names. Besides, reading and writing wasn’t the most important thing there.

For a trade, I picked welding. I don’t know where I got the idea. I’d never seen anyone welding. I’d only seen iron being forged in a smithy. And once I heard the blacksmith say to someone that he couldn’t help with a particular repair, that it would need to be welded. But after a year it turned out there weren’t enough welding torches to go around. Plus, the ones they did have kept breaking down. Not to mention that you’d often have to wait forever for a delivery of oxygen cylinders.

So they put me in with the electricians. The school could train any number of electricians, since the electrification of the villages was beginning. Just like when I picked welding I had no idea how welding was done, I also had no idea what electricity was. How could I have? The only light I knew was the sun and oil lamps. Though Uncle Jan had told us that in some cities they even lit the street lamps with electricity. And that in the houses, it was everywhere. When we asked what electricity was, he said it shines much brighter than an oil lamp. You don’t need to add oil, or clean the glass, or trim the wick. There’s a switch on the wall, you turn it and the light comes on.

Why did they put me with the electricians and not the bricklayers or the joiners, for instance? Well, when I picked welding I had to pass a test that involved climbing a pole. Because welders often have to work high up. They needed to check whether I could handle heights, or if I’d get dizzy. There was a pole on the playground, with the bark stripped off, it was all slippery from those tests. I shinned up it all the way to the top. I might have gone even higher, but they started shouting from below:

“Come down! There’s nothing above the pole! You’re done! Come down!”

Because what was a pole like that for me? I used to climb every tree in the woods. The highest poplars along the Rutka. And let me tell you, poplars are the hardest trees to climb. Especially if it’s a tall thin one. I’d pull myself up with my arms alone, brace my bare feet against the trunk, without any belt. And since electrician training depended on passing that test, as electricians even more than welders work high up, they decided I could just as well be an electrician as a welder.

Electrician or welder, it was all the same to me. The only thing keeping me in that school was the chance of learning the saxophone. Otherwise I would have run away like others did. Sometimes they’d catch them and make them come back to school, other times they vanished without a trace. Me, they wouldn’t have caught me, I knew where I’d need to go.

Almost every evening I went down to the rec room and practiced. We’d come back for example from a whole day filling in trenches, we’d be fit to drop, our eyelids drooping with sleep, sometimes the other boys would collapse on their beds even without washing or eating, but I’d go to the rec room and practice. My hands would be numb from using the shovel, my lips were cracked from thirst, but I had to practice at least a bit. Once in a while the music teacher would come by. He’d sit and listen, taking swigs from that bottle of his. From time to time he’d correct something I was doing, make a suggestion, or offer an excuse, say that if only he weren’t drunk. And since the more swigs he took the drunker he got, he’d end up just mumbling after every sip:

“You’re a stubborn one, that you are. But music likes the stubborn ones. It may even repay you for it one day. But don’t give up. Never give up. It doesn’t always repay people, but maybe with you it will. Maybe you’ll know that happiness. Sometimes it sucks you in to the point that you lose yourself, you lose the will to live. But maybe you’ll be lucky. Don’t give up. And it’d be good if one of these days you found a better teacher. One who’s not a drunk. A real teacher. Forgive me, son, I just have to. I hope it never happens to you.”

He’d sometimes even fall asleep with the bottle in his hand. I’d take it from him and slip it back in the pocket where he always kept it. He’d wake, smile, then go back to sleep. I’d tell him to wake up and go to his room. He lived in the teacher’s block. I’d shake him. Or tell him the commandant was coming, so as to scare him into getting up. But he was only afraid of the commandant when he was sober. When he was drunk, even if I managed to wake him by mentioning the commandant, he’d only spit out some cuss word, mumbling as if I’d made him mad. You know where that peasant can put it, son. Sorry.

And he’d go back to sleep. What worked better was the trumpet, or best of all the flute. The flute seemed to reach deepest into his drunkenness. So if the trumpet didn’t do the job I’d put it down, pick up the flute and play it right by his ear. Not too loud, of course. After a moment he’d put his pinky finger in his ear and wiggle it, something evidently itched. Then, though his eyes were still closed, a smile would appear on his lips, when it was the flute that is. With the trumpet he’d make a face. Then he’d open one eye and give me a warm look for a moment. Then the other eye, though that one was usually indifferent and ponderous. Sometimes he’d wag his finger at me, but in a well-meaning way.

“You are a stubborn one.” Especially because his finger, trembling along with his drunken hand, wasn’t exactly threatening. “Don’t give up. Don’t give up.”

And he’d reach into his pocket for the bottle. Often there’d be nothing left in it, but still he’d tip it back and get a last drop.

“You see, son,” he’d say, sighing heavily as if at the empty bottle. “You see, I’ve gone to the dogs. But you, don’t you give up.”

But in order for him to let me take him back to his room, I’d first have to sit him, drunk as he was, in front of the piano. He would say he just had to play a few bars, then we could go. But it was never just a few bars. There were times he played and played. Despite being drunk, you wouldn’t have credited it. The strangest thing was that his hands sobered up completely, you had the feeling they were stroking the keys.

His hands were slim like yours, with long fingers. When I watch you shelling the beans it’s like I’m watching his hands on the keyboard. Come on, you must have done this before. You’re already better at it than I am. My hands are stiff. You wouldn’t have gotten so good so quickly if you hadn’t ever done it before. We haven’t shelled that much yet, but already you’re doing such a good job I can’t believe it. Maybe you just forgot? When you haven’t done something in years you can forget it, even shelling beans. You can forget anything. But it doesn’t take much to remember again. I’d forgotten too. That’s why I planted beans, so I could remember once more. Though like I said, I’m not even that fond of beans. I can take them or leave them.

Do you play the piano? No, I was just asking. I can still see those hands of his as he sat drunk at the piano. It was like he himself was intoxicated, then there were his hands living a life of their own on the keyboard, sober as can be. He may have been a great musician, who can know. The fact that he was playing in that pseudo-school of ours was another matter. How many people are there that are in the wrong place? No, he didn’t just play the piano. He could play any instrument he picked up. Violin, flute, cello, French horn, anything. Of course, only if he wasn’t too inebriated. For me he recommended I concentrate on the violin. He didn’t like the saxophone.

“With the saxophone, the most you’ll do is play in a dance band. The violin on the other hand, that can take you far, son. You were born to play the violin. I know what I’m talking about.”

One time I led him back to his room when he was drunk, I had one arm around his waist holding him up, and I put my head under his arm so his whole weight was leaning on me. He was muttering something into my ear. What I caught of it was:

“The violin, the violin, son. The violin appeals to your heart. The violin appeals to your soul. You’re a good kid. You’ll be dearer to God with the violin.”

“I don’t know if God would agree to listen to me play,” I said without thinking.

“Don’t say that.” He stopped me with the entire inertia of his drunken body. “Don’t think that. If He listens to anything, it’s only the violin. The violin is a divine instrument. He doesn’t listen to words anymore, it’s beyond Him. There are too many of them. And too many languages. Eternity wouldn’t be long enough to listen to all the languages of the world. But the violin is in one language. The violin contains the sounds of all languages, all worlds, this world and the next, life and death. Words are beyond Him, however all-powerful He is.”

I don’t know, maybe it was helpful advice. But I chose the saxophone. Course, you might ask what help a drunk could be when he couldn’t help himself. It may have been that it was against God I chose the sax, since His favorite is the violin. The fact was, God owed me. And him, whenever he’d had a skinful he’d always go on about God.

One time, in front of a full rec room he talked about how building a new world should start not from bricklaying and plastering, or welding or glazing, but from music. And if God had started from music, no new world would even be needed. Someone informed on him to the commandant. The commandant called him in, apparently there was a scene and he threatened the music teacher that if he didn’t quit talking about God he’d be sent back where he came from. He was lucky he’d been drunk when he said what he said. Of course they knew he drank. But they had no way of finding another music teacher. He was the only one who’d agreed to work at the school. That was the kind of school it was. They said the instruments had been confiscated from various oppressors, parasites, tyrants, all kinds of bad guys.

I didn’t understand who they were referring to. We were told this by our homeroom teacher. Now the instruments were for us, who were the future of a new and better world. Actually, I found it hard to understand anything back then. I was afraid of everything, people, things, words. Whenever I had to talk I’d get stuck on every word. Often I couldn’t even get past the first one. The simplest word would hurt, and each one would feel like it wasn’t mine.

When everyone in the dormitory had already fallen asleep, I’d put my head under the blanket and quiz myself in a whisper about this or that word, as if I was learning them from scratch, taming them, getting them used to being mine. Once in a while some boy in a nearby bed would wake up, tug at my blanket and ask:

“Hey, what are you talking to yourself for?”

“Hey, wake up, I think you’re having a nightmare. You were talking in your sleep.”

Sometimes boys in the other beds would wake, they’d wake others up, and one bed after another they’d laugh, make fun of me for talking to myself.

Why did I do it in bed, under the blanket? I couldn’t say. Maybe words need warmth when they’re being reborn. Because when I landed in that school I was virtually mute. I could already talk a bit, but not much, and all in a jumble. When someone asked me a question, I couldn’t give them an answer even if I knew what I was supposed to say. It was only thanks to starting to play music that I gradually got my speech back, and along with it the feeling that I was alive. In any case I stopped stuttering so badly, and I held onto more and more words, and I was less and less afraid of them.

In fact, I was so insatiable that I decided to learn every instrument there was. Even percussion. There wasn’t much in the way of percussion instruments. A drum, one snare, a cymbal, a triangle. But when I played them I would sometimes feel something twitching inside me, as if a clock were starting to tick that till now had been stopped. In time I came to understand. In my view it’s not just music but life itself that’s governed by rhythm. When someone loses their sense of rhythm, they lose hope. What are tears, what is despair, if not an absence of rhythm. What is memory if not rhythm.

Though most of all I practiced on the saxophone. And let me tell you, there was something in the saxophone, even though those were only the very beginnings, that when I slung it around my neck, and put the mouthpiece between my lips, and placed my hands around the tube, just by doing that I could feel hope entering into me. Or that’s not quite it, it was something deeper, like I was trying to be born all over again. Who knows, maybe there’s something of that sort in all instruments. But I could only feel it with the sax. And right then, in school, I made up my mind that one day I’d buy a saxophone. I had to, come what may.

So when I graduated from the school and got a job working on the electrification of the villages, from the very first pay day I began setting money aside for that saxophone. Not a lot to begin with, because I didn’t earn a lot. I wasn’t a fully-fledged electrician right from the beginning. More of a gopher, as they say. I mostly worked putting up telegraph poles. One team strung the wires up on the poles, the other installed electricity in the houses. It was only later that they let me do other jobs. For example, when a house was built of stone and you had to make grooves in the stone for the wires, I would make the grooves. In the houses it was much better. You could earn a little extra for this or that odd job. Though in those days there weren’t that many stone-built houses. Sometimes they’d give you something, a cup of milk and a slice of bread and cheese. Or they’d let you pick an apple or a plum or pear if they had an orchard. Because sometimes our stomachs rumbled from hunger, especially toward the end of the month.

But however hungry a month it was, I had to set something aside for the saxophone. I knew the moment I collected my wages that I’d run out before the end of the month, but I had to put something away for the saxophone. Often I was tempted to borrow a few zloties from the saxophone. Not for food. For food I wouldn’t have dared. But for instance when my shirt was in tatters, or my socks couldn’t be darned anymore. Winter would be coming and I could have used some warmer clothes, long johns, a sweater, new shoes. It goes without saying that we worked in the winter too. Just not in severe frosts, we’d only work inside the houses then. But when it was only a bit below freezing we’d go on digging holes for the telegraph poles, breaking the frozen earth with pickaxes.

I kept my money in my mattress, in the straw, wrapped in newspaper. Believe me, a mattress is the best place to hide money. Especially when you changed villages and lodgings the way we did, your mattress was the best place. You slept on your mattress, squashed it with your body, who would have suspected there was money in there. When I added to it from the new month’s wages, I’d often have to search the entire mattress to find it.

I really was tempted to borrow some back. I’d take it out, unwrap it, and wrestle with myself that maybe after all I could. I mean, of course I’d return it. Maybe I’d even give it back with interest for however long it was till the next pay day. One time. I swear I’ll give it back. Just this once. Nothing’ll happen. When all’s said and done it’s my money, I’m borrowing from myself. It’d be a whole other story if I was borrowing from someone else. I’d be borrowing from myself, so I wouldn’t even have to explain if I just took something for a week or a month, because it certainly wouldn’t be any longer. Did I really not trust myself to that extent? My own money and I didn’t trust myself? Let me at least count how much I’ve saved. Though I already knew how much. I’d count it every month when I added more. But what was the harm in it, I’d count it, since I wasn’t going to borrow anything anyway. True, counting it doesn’t make it more, but it cheers you up that at least it hasn’t gotten any less.

I’d count it, smooth out any wrinkled notes, sort it into piles of hundreds, five hundreds, thousands, wrap each pile with a single note. Then I’d divide it all up again, but this time not according to denominations but in equal amounts. If I thought there weren’t enough piles I’d reduce the size of each amount so there’d be more. You know, there’s something in money that when it sucks you in it becomes hard to spend it on anything at all. I even started to worry that later I’d be reluctant to spend the money on a saxophone.

One of the electricians fell from a pole and broke an arm and a leg, and they put me in his place. I became a full electrician even though I hadn’t finished my whole training period. So I was earning more, which meant the saxophone was getting closer and closer. They began letting me do overtime and take on private jobs. I wasn’t putting up poles anymore, but installing wires on the poles. And you put in the most overtime on those poles. Everything was way behind schedule and a directive came down that things should be hurried along. So there was a lot more overtime to be had. Before the pole was put up you had to fix glass or porcelain insulators on the top. Then you’d go up and string the wires, attaching them to the insulators.

Despite the overtime, there weren’t that many volunteers for working on the poles. Most of the guys preferred installing electricity in people’s homes. So the lines were behind, they had to catch up with the houses. We’d sometimes be working on the poles right up until dusk. It was another matter that if you weren’t used to it, you couldn’t stay up on one of those poles for long. Oh no, you’d have spikes on your feet, you could put your weight on them. Have you never seen electricians working up on a pole? The whole planet is covered in those poles. Here, on the lake, the electricity comes from poles. Concrete ones, but back then they were wooden. How can I explain what the spikes looked like. They’re like sickles, semicircular, they fasten onto the soles of your boots. You don’t know what a sickle is? Never seen one? Way back when, they’d cut the crops with sickles. What does a sickle look like? You know, like a new moon. Plus, you’d have a big belt around your lower back that went around you and the pole. Despite that, you had to have strength in your back and in your legs to go up one pole after another, day after day.

Most of the electricians were older guys, from before the war, some of them were sickly after their wartime experiences, so when they’d climbed one pole, climbed a second, on the third one their legs wouldn’t obey them and their lower back would be killing them. When the weather turned colder their hands would be numb. They had gauntlets, but it wasn’t the kind of work you could do in gauntlets. And though overtime paid double, they left the pole work to the younger men. They’d make up for it and more when they were installing electricity in the houses. Otherwise they wouldn’t have given us the overtime so easily.

Another thing was, most all of them drank. Boy did they ever! In the lodgings, after work, not a day went by. But also at work. Sometimes they’d drink from the early morning. And if they didn’t drink it was because they hadn’t yet sobered up from the previous day. How could you climb a pole in that state? Whereas for me climbing a pole was nothing, like I said. I could clamber up poles the whole livelong day. I even enjoyed it. And back then I still didn’t drink. I was protected from it by the saxophone, I was trying to earn as much as I could and save as much as I could.

Actually, the other guys might not have drunk so much themselves, but in almost every home people made their own moonshine. You could get hold of booze any time of the day or night. You’d just knock on someone’s window and they’d hand you the bottle through the window. Not to mention that moonshine was the preferred form of payment. In general you could do anything with moonshine. No one believed in money anymore. The true currency was moonshine. And what else could you do with moonshine but drink it? So they drank.

I have to hand it to them though, despite the fact they drank, they were first-rate electricians. They could do any job, drunk or sober. All the things I learned in school were nothing compared to what I learned from them. You just had to watch closely when they were doing something. And listen real carefully, not miss a single word. Each one of them had his secrets, and sometimes one or another of them would give them away despite themselves. What secrets? You’re not an electrician, what would be the point of telling you?

Well, it’s not hard to guess. You didn’t know what spikes are, what a sickle is. I will tell you one thing, a pro can recognize another pro from two or three words, especially one from the same line of work. I’m not denying that ignorance is also a kind of knowledge. But ignorance won’t help you learn the secrets of electricians. When someone doesn’t have any trade at all it’s hard to understand him even as a person. In any case, when I’d sometimes watch them at work I had the impression that electricity flowed through them the way it does through wiring. There was no problem they couldn’t fix. Often there was a shortage of materials, so they’d switch one part from here to there, wrap it in something, solder something or other. For them, nothing was impossible. So later on, when I started working on building sites, I could handle the most difficult installations. For instance I worked on the building of a cold storage plant where all the machinery ran on electricity. I set it all up without a hitch.

The one thing I didn’t learn from them was drinking vodka. That wasn’t till the building sites. Back then though I never touched a drop, the saxophone meant that much to me. At one of the lodgings I was living with a group of men and every evening they kept trying to persuade me, invite me, and they were heavy drinkers. They even started to accuse me of being a snitch. Because in their eyes, anyone who didn’t drink had to be a snitch. Especially a young guy like me. They didn’t trust young people. That’s understandable. Young people will do anything to get ahead of their elders. Young people are in a hurry. They don’t have the patience that comes with experience. They don’t realize that either way we’re all headed toward the same thing. Young people always think they’re going to build a new and better world. All of them. New young people, old young people. And they end up leaving behind the kind of world no one wants to live in. If you ask me, the quicker you outgrow your youth the better it is for the world, really. I was young once and I know. I believed in a new and better world too. Especially since after a war like that it wasn’t hard to believe in, because there wasn’t anything else to believe in. And few things are easier to believe in than a new and better world.

So it’s hardly surprising they’d accuse me of one thing or another, even of informing, since I didn’t drink. They didn’t know I was saving up for a saxophone. I kept that a total secret. I might have often had a drink with them, but I knew the expectations for when you drank. If I drank a glass I’d have to provide at least one bottle. Plus bread, pickled cucumbers, sausage. And I would regret every least penny. I excused myself by saying I had duodenal ulcers. I didn’t actually know what ulcers were, I didn’t know what a duodenum was. But one time I went into a compartment in a train calling out, pears, plums, apples, and someone offered some to someone else but the other person refused saying he had duodenal ulcers and he had to stick to a strict diet. As it happened, I looked like I had ulcers. Years later, when I was abroad, it turned out I in fact did.

According to those electricians of mine, however, and not just those ones but other ones I lived with in different lodgings, when I was on the building sites already, vodka was the best medicine for ulcers too. Because why did they not have ulcers? Well, why?

I may surprise you by saying this, but perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that they drank. Because when they didn’t drink they had trouble sleeping. You’d think that when they were exhausted after a long day’s work, they ought to have been out like a light. But one of them couldn’t get to sleep, another one would wake up all the time, a third one slept such a shallow sleep he couldn’t say if he’d been asleep or not. And here it was morning already, time for work. The worst of it is that when you have problems sleeping, all kinds of different thoughts come to you and make it even harder to sleep.

In one village five of us were sharing a place together, all of them older guys, I was the only youngster, and one of the master electricians was also living with us. We called him master even when he wasn’t there. Go see the master, ask the master, the master’ll know what to do. I don’t know if you know how people usually talk about masters behind their back. In any case, they don’t call them master.

He didn’t talk much, he never let himself get drawn into conversation even over vodka. He liked vodka, why wouldn’t he? But getting him to talk was like drawing water from the deepest well. And they were never words that meant anything to you. Maybe to him, but not to others. Yes, no, who knows, maybe, we’ll have to think about it. Nothing was definite.

One evening it so happened that they didn’t drink. We’d come home late from work. One of them asked, Has anyone got anything? No one did, and no one felt like going to get some. All right then, let’s just go to bed. We got into our beds and turned out the light, it went quiet, I began to fall asleep. All at once one of them let out a deep sigh, another one turned on his other side with the whole weight of his body. And then everyone started switching from side to side, straightening the bedding, twisting and turning. The beds were old ones, they creaked with the slightest movement.

The master’s bed was by the window. After the light was turned out he would always smoke a last cigarette. He’d also smoke when he woke up in the middle of the night. At those times he’d have to smoke two or three before he could get back to sleep. It was only vodka that put him to sleep right away. Though that also depended on how much he’d had to drink. If it was quite a bit, then right away. If it wasn’t much, it was a lot harder for him. At those times he’d smoke and smoke. There was a geranium on the windowsill by his bed and he’d tap the ash into the flowerpot and put his cigarette out in it. He’d always fish the butts out in the morning, and from the number of butts you could tell how he’d slept. And not only that.

It wasn’t only a measure of his insomnia. But what did we know, we were just electricians. For us cigarette butts were just cigarette butts. On top of that, you could always smell the smoke in the morning, so we’d sniff and say, boy, the master sure smoked up a storm. So that night he lit up just the same, and one of the guys asked:

“Are you not asleep, master? For some reason I can’t get to sleep myself.”

Right away, from all the other beds people said they couldn’t either.

“That’s how it is when you don’t have a drink before you go to bed,” someone said, and someone else cursed. One of them recollected that somewhere or other the moonshine was stronger than some other place.

And a conversation started up. The master lit up again. He ashed the cigarette in the geranium and the geranium glowed for a second. When he took a drag, his face glowed too. You could see he was lying there with eyes open. But he didn’t seem to be listening to what the other men were talking about, because he didn’t say a word. Me, I was the youngest so I had no right to speak, I just listened. Besides, what could I have said when for instance they were discussing what each of them would do if he found out his wife was cheating on him. They were all married, whereas I wasn’t even thinking about that. Though we didn’t know if the master was married. He never spoke about it. But obviously, start thinking about your wife cheating on you and you won’t sleep a wink all night. Then the next morning you’ll be all fingers and thumbs. But each one of them knew what he’d do. One of them would kill her, another would kick her out of the house, a third one would do some other thing.

Then they started wondering if old guys can still do it, and when a man starts being old as far as that’s concerned. You know what I mean. And if he can’t, then what keeps him alive? And is it even worth living then? One of them said that God directs life, that people have no right to ask whether it’s worth it. So they got on to God. Whether after a war like the last one people should keep believing in God or not. One of them said they should, because it wasn’t God that started the war, it was people. Someone else said, fair enough, though if He’d wanted to He could have held people back. Someone else again put in: They say that people pull the trigger, God brings the bullets, so He could have arranged the war so there’d be less misery, less suffering, less death. And they started telling stories of different things they’d seen or heard about. One of them whose brother had been executed by firing squad got so upset that he asked right out whether God even exists. He asked each bed in turn what we thought. Does He? I pretended to be asleep. Eventually he got to the master.

“What do you think, master, does God exist?”

The master had just put out a cigarette in the geranium pot, and he lit another. It was about the fourth since we’d put the light out. The whole time he’d not opened his mouth, it was like he wasn’t even listening. We waited intently to see what he’d say, as if it depended on him whether God existed. The one who’d asked him repeated his question.

“What do you say, master? Does He exist or not?”

“Who?” he finally said.

“God.”

He didn’t answer right away, first he crushed his cigarette out.

“Why are you asking me? Why are you asking them? You don’t need to take a vote. You should ask yourself. Me, all I can tell you is that where I was, He wasn’t there.”

He lit up yet again. Everyone went quiet, no one dared ask any more questions. No one said anything at all to anyone else. A moment later they started falling asleep. Here you could hear a whistling sound, over there someone breathing more loudly. I was wondering if the master was asleep, because no sound came from his bed. But he also hadn’t lit another cigarette.

As for me, I couldn’t get to sleep. My head was spinning with thoughts from the conversation, because for me all the things they’d been talking about were kind of beyond the bounds of my imagination. And the thing that troubled me the most was where the master could have been, that God wasn’t there.

The next day I went to him for advice because the fuses kept blowing when I’d turn on this three-way switch. And I asked him:

“Where were you?”

He gave me a suspicious look.

“I hope you never have to go there.” After which he grunted: “Get back to work. You know what you need to do.”

As far as the saxophone was concerned, I was managing to put more and more aside every month. I never missed the chance for overtime. In addition, in the evenings or on Sundays there was work on the side. I wouldn’t take moonshine in payment, only money. I preferred getting paid less but that it be in cash. I could wait, but let it be cash. In pretty much every village there was always someone wanted us to put in a second switch, a second outlet, and for each switch or outlet you’d have to do the wiring. According to the regulations, which is to say, at the lower cost, they were only allowed one switch and one outlet per room. And hallways, pantries, attics weren’t allowed, or anywhere else. The attics you could understand, in most of the houses the attic was under a thatched roof, if there’d been a short circuit the house would have gone up like kindling. But for example, why should you have to walk down the hallway in darkness, groping for the door handle? Or take an oil lamp to the pantry, when there’s electricity in the house?

So we’d install things wherever people wanted them. Privately, it goes without saying. If someone wanted it in the hallway, in their pantry, over the front door, say the word and it’ll be done. For so and so much. Someone wanted to have an extension out to their cattle shed, why not, that could be done. It was rare, but some people asked for that. In one village someone even wanted us to put in an extension to his barn, because he’d bought an electric motor on the cheap, and he wanted to convert his thresher and winnowing machine to electricity instead of keeping on using the treadmill. We did it. He just had to wait a bit till we were able to siphon off some of the materials from the official allocations. But we also did installations in attics under the thatch if people wanted. You’d wrap the cable in an additional layer of insulating tape, feed it through an insulated tube that was made of metal, but properly lined, and attach it on elevated brackets at the necessary distance from the thatch, along a beam, while the switch would be put in on the chimney flue. And nothing untoward would happen. With private work there were no restrictions. As you know, things that were not possible officially were possible unofficially.

Not everyone was in favor of electricity, though, far from it. Some folks wouldn’t even give permission for a pole to be put up outside their house. What, I’m supposed to stare at a pole for the rest of my life? The hell with that! It’s my land up to the middle of the road. There were times they came after us with pickaxes, we had to call the police. They wouldn’t let us into their homes, they’d drive us off like thieves. Especially because with the houses, they weren’t being forced. If someone didn’t want electricity, that was their business. How did they explain it? In different ways. That there’d be another war soon, just you wait. And in wartime oil lamps are your best bet. If you run out of kerosene you can burn linseed oil. You just had to plant flax. Of all the different kinds of light, the most reliable were the sun, as long as God was willing, and oil lamps. It doesn’t need to be as bright in the night as during the day. It’s enough if it’s light during the day, nighttime is for sleeping. Were we trying to turn the world upside down? With all these poles and wires? What if the sparrows and the swallows sit on them? They’ll get burned to cinders. It’ll draw lightning. Sickness too, maybe. The sicknesses we already have are more than enough. You wouldn’t earn anything extra from those kinds of people, of course. But in general you didn’t do too badly with the private jobs. For millers, for example, before the government took over the mills. In the presbyteries and churches. Though with the priests you could never be sure. They’d always get away with a God bless you.

So one time when I counted up again how much I’d put aside for the saxophone, it seemed like it might actually be enough. I had no idea of the price of a saxophone. I started asking around among the musicians in the villages. They could tell me the price of a harmonica or fiddle or clarinet, but most of them had never even heard of a saxophone. Well, I took one day off and headed for the nearest town. There was a music shop, but they didn’t have any saxophones, nor did they know how much one might cost, especially now after the war. So some time later I took myself to another town, a bigger one. They didn’t have one either, but they promised to find out how much one might be, they might even try to order one if they could. They’d also ask around privately, maybe someone would have one, because from time to time people brought them instruments to sell. I gave them my name. I wanted to leave a down payment but they wouldn’t take it. They said to try back in a month or two. If one came in they’d set it aside.

You have no idea how much each night before I fell asleep I’d imagine hanging that saxophone around my neck, putting the mouthpiece between my lips, running my fingers over the keys. I even decided that when I finally got it, I’d throw a drinking party to celebrate and get drunk myself.

All of a sudden, out of the blue one day, someone heard on the corn cob that there was going to be a change of currency. What’s the corn cob? Not the airplane, they also gave that name to the radio speakers that were put in people’s homes, only if they wanted of course, where they already had electricity. And the new currency, you know what that was about? Not just that there were going to be different banknotes. It was that with the new ones you could buy three times less. You never heard of a change like that? Where were you then? Though never mind that. In any case, a saxophone was out of the question now. To be honest, I didn’t even feel angry. I didn’t feel anything at all. The only thing I felt was that I had no reason to go on living. So I decided to hang myself.

That day we were working on a transformer pole. Transformer poles look like giant As. They’re made of two poles that come together at the top, while lower down they’re reinforced by a linking horizontal crossbeam. I was going to use that beam. The previous day I borrowed a halter from one of the farmers. Towards evening, when I was through with work I put my tools away in the toolbag and dropped it to the ground. I tied one end of the halter to the crossbeam and made a noose in the other end. I put the noose around my neck and I was about to pull my spiked boots clear of the pole when I glanced down at the ground and I saw Uncle Jan. He was standing with his head tipped back, watching what I was doing. No, it wasn’t an illusion. I saw him plain as I see you now.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “I hanged myself, and I don’t see any difference.”