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tables were free. And often it wasn’t just one or two of us,
there’d be a dozen or more guys hovering over the ones
who were eating. We’d even tell them to get a move on, eat
faster, as a result of which some of them would deliberately
draw out their meal. It was infuriating, here your stomach
was rumbling, here there was work to do, and right in front
of you there were empty tables, almost taunting you. On
top of that, often they only showed up when the last men
were eating, any number of us could have eaten at their
tables in the meantime. It sometimes happened that
someone couldn’t wait and went back to work without
getting their lunch. At most they’d grab some herring or an
egg from the snack bar, or a bit of sausage, though they
didn’t often have sausage, and they’d go back to work still
half hungry.
And just imagine, she fell in love with one of the guys from
those tables. In front of everyone, on the very first day. He
came in, sat down, and she served him his soup. He looked
at her, and she didn’t blush, she just looked back at him.
For a moment they looked at each other like that, and the
whole cafeteria stopped eating for a second. Even if
someone was lifting a spoonful of soup to their mouth, or a
fork with potatoes or meat, they froze and watched. All the
time they’d been grabbing her braid and saying, You look
nice today Miss Basia, or Basieńka, and here some complete
stranger had shown up and she wasn’t even blushing.
He was holding his spoon also, but he hadn’t yet put it in