A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski Page B

a war. And everything happened after the last one, before the last one, after the one before it, before the one before it, or before the one even before that. He even remembered that war. He remembered that his father, which is to say my great-grandfather, had fought in it, and he’d been wounded, though in the head, not in the belly. And from great-grandfather’s memory he also remembered an earlier war that great-grandfather remembered from the memory of his own father, that is, grandfather’s grandfather, and it had a particular name, and that was even before the other one, when neither me nor any of you were in the world, he’d say.
    You’d have gotten lost in all those wars if you’d listened to grandfather. He was so meek and helpless in it all. You’d never have imagined he could have been a soldier. All the more that he could have killed someone. He couldn’t kill a chicken. He’d put its head on the chopping block, lift the ax and just stand there till someone came out of the house and took the ax from him and brought it down on the chicken’s neck. Or he’d grumble about the moles that weredigging up the meadow. The damn things wouldn’t stop burrowing, pretty soon there wouldn’t be a meadow anymore, just endless molehills. He’d go out with a spade, stand over one of the molehills, and even though he knew perfectly well that the mole was frisking about inside, he’d always say that something held him back from driving the blade of the spade into the molehill. Supposedly he was waiting till the mole was sure it was safe, so it’d come closer to the surface. He’d be holding his breath, standing stock still, poised to sink the spade in, and he’d tell himself, now, do it now, but something would hold him back. He would have hit it for sure, the mole was already poking its little snout outside, he would have sliced its head off without any problem, the blade was sharp as a razor, he’d sharpened it specially beforehand. But something stopped him. Evidently the thing that stayed his hand was stronger than he was.
    I heard that one time the mole actually came out of the molehill and the two of them just stood there, grandfather and the mole, looking at each other. And grandfather got this feeling as if it weren’t a mole he was about to kill. And he said:
    “Live on, you’re one of God’s creations. The meadow’ll survive somehow or other.”
    Grandfather never even got into fights at dances when he was young, though there were fights, there were all kinds of fights, sometimes the whole dance would be fighting among themselves. He never even fought over grandmother, though she was constantly being whisked away to dance. He’d just sit on a bench while grandmother danced. He preferred to just watch her dancing with someone else, rather than fighting over her. No, he was a big man, strong as an ox, when he was young he must have been a strapping guy. It was just that, like I said, he was meek and helpless, as if his own strength made him weak.
    “Ah, she’d dance and dance, you wouldn’t have known her,” he would remember proudly. “When it came to the
oberek
, she’d fly through the air. When I looked at her feet, they wouldn’t even be touching the floor. Why should I have been angry? She’d dance her fill, and I knew she’d be mine anyway.”
    When they got married, grandfather had already been called up to servein the war. He didn’t want the marriage, who knew if he’d come back, he said. But grandmother said that a wife waiting for a husband was different than an engaged woman waiting for her fiancé. And she led grandfather to the altar. Now she was his wife he’d know how to go to war. They’d have a different kind of joy when he came back, because he had to come back. She might curse God if he didn’t come back.
    And so to stop grandmother having to curse God, grandfather had such a rush of strength when he felt the bayonet in his belly that he killed the man who stuck it