Free A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski Page B

maybe something the matter with him, and I asked:
    “How’s your health?”
    “What you’d expect for my age,” he answered tersely. “I have an operation coming up.”
    “Is it anything serious?”
    “That remains to be seen. For the moment I’m waiting for an available bed in the hospital. They’ve promised me there’ll be one. It could even be tomorrow or the next day. They’re going to let me know. I already have a bag packed. I wouldn’t be able to drive down there with you. I haven’t sold the cabin yet. You can stay there.”
    He told me where to find the key. Under the deck, on a nail in one of the beams. He said I should just put it back there when I left. He told me where to turn the electricity on so I’d have light and hot water. And heating of course, since it was already cold there. Where the bedding was, towels, this and that.
    “When do you reckon you’ll be back from the hospital?” I asked.
    “How should I know?” he retorted almost rudely, as if he wanted to bring the conversation to a close.
    “Maybe I could come visit you if you’re still …?”
    “What for? A hospital’s no place for a visit. Besides, I don’t like that sort of thing.”
    “Perhaps I could be of help in some way?”
    “You, help me? How do you like that.” His tone was so ironic it left a really unpleasant impression.
    “Still, I hope we’ll meet again some time.”
    “We already did meet.”
    Those were his last words.

3
    Haven’t we met before? But where and when? As I look at you, your face seems somehow familiar. Actually, I thought so the moment you walked in. Though maybe you just look like someone I must have met at some time. I don’t know who it could have been. If I could remember who it was I might also remember when and where. I mean, it can happen that people resemble one another, that one person can sometimes be mistaken for someone else. Especially if you were close with someone then you never see them again, you want to meet up with them again even in a stranger. Though when it comes down to it, what difference does it make whether someone looks like somebody else. As the years pass we resemble our own selves less and less. Even our memory isn’t always willing to remember us the way we once were. Let alone when it comes to other people.
    I often experience that here as well. I know everyone, I have it all written down, who lives in which cabin, but at the beginning of the season when they start arriving, with some of them I have to remind myself all over again whether or not they’re the same people. I sometimes wonder, can a human face have changed so very much from one season to the next? True, there are faces that seem in general to escape your memory. With a face like that, you can look at it every day, then it’s enough not to see it till the next season and you can’t sayanymore whether it’s new or whether you’ve seen it before. But there are also faces that you barely catch a glimpse of, and already they’re fixed forever in your memory.
    Oftentimes I’ve been walking down some crowded city street, a throng of people, you’re constantly bumping into someone or other, and I might be seeing nothing at all, none of the buildings, advertisements, shop windows, cars, and people’s faces are just flashing by for a brief second, then suddenly amid all those glimpses there’s one face, why this particular one I couldn’t say, but it bores into my memory and remains there for good. Actually I carry inside me an infinite number of those faces that were conceived in those short flashes, as it were. I don’t know whose they are, I don’t know where or when, I don’t know anything about them. But they live in me. Their thoughts, their expressions, their paleness, their sorrows, grimaces, bitternesses – it all lives in me, fixed as if in a photograph. Except that these aren’t regular photographs where once someone’s captured, they stay that way forever. Then years later