A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski Page A

Jan, who didn’t believe in anything anymore. Not to mention grandfather, who would be so intent on listening he’d stop shelling beans. Though the others too, the husks would hang loose in their hands, and the beans would fall much less often onto the canvas sheet. Though father didn’t like kings, he used to blame all kinds of misfortunes on kings, so when grandmother started telling about a king he’d sometimes interrupt her:
    “What country was he from? You know, the king. A king can’t be from just anywhere. Ordinary people can, they have to live wherever they find themselves. But not a king. Where there’s a king there has to be a kingdom. If there’s no kingdom, even dreams wouldn’t want him as king.”
    Though for the dream it made no difference what country the king was from,and it would often upset Uncle Jan, who was sort of brought back to life from the bean-shelling:
    “It’s all nonsense, mother. Dreams are nonsense and waking is nonsense. And kings, they were gotten rid of long ago, how could their dreams still be around.” After which he’d get up and go drink some water.
    Mother, on the other hand, she’d always defend grandmother loyally. For mother no dream was dreamed in vain, whatever it’s meaning was, and people should know what it meant. Because it was worse not to know than to know the worst. So grandfather, who believed that all dreams came from God, would praise grandmother’s wisdom all the more:
    “All those learned folks and ministers and priests, while she never studied at all and yet look what she knows.”
    And every morning, as we were eating our
?urek
soup with potatoes, amid the slurping and the clatter of spoons against the tin bowls, when grandmother would ask who had had what dreams and would try to explain them all, grandfather would be so filled with admiration at how clever grandmother was that he’d pause with his spoonful of soup or potatoes halfway to his mouth. At times the soup would spill on the table, or a potato would fall off the spoon, and grandmother would tell him off:
    “Don’t make such a mess.”
    But he’d have to give words to his admiration:
    “How about that. You wouldn’t even know what you’d dreamed about if she hadn’t explained it for you. Dreams really are a second life once they’re explained to you. But for that you need to be smart, sharp as nails. Smart enough to take you into the next world and beyond.”
    He never could forgive himself for not having dreams. When he fell asleep it was like he’d died. Then when he woke up it was like he was rising from the dead. But between the falling asleep and the rising from the dead there was a big gap. If he’d ever felt like counting up all those gaps, it would come out that a third of his life he wasn’t in the world. He couldn’t even dream anything fromwartime, though he’d been through four wars in his life. He fought in one of them, got wounded, he had this huge gash from a bayonet in his stomach. But he was fine. Maybe if the bayonet wound had hurt, but it hadn’t hurt him a bit, quite the opposite, he’d felt such a surge of strength that he killed the guy that stuck the bayonet in his belly, and the guy’s two buddies as well.
    When it came to wars, grandfather was just as much an expert on them as grandmother was on dreams. No one was his equal about wars. Wars were the milestones that prevented him from getting lost in his memory, in the world. He stuck to wars like they were familiar paths, whatever he happened to be talking about. When someone else would tell a story, grandfather always asked which war it happened after or before. Grandfather’s memory was made up of wars instead of calendars or saints’ days. Wars were more important than the seasons, above wars there was only God. According to grandfather, time moved from one war to the next. And in the same way, wars marked out space much more accurately than maps. Everything that happened, happened where there was