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.