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What kind of meat is this, it’s bad enough it’s offcuts! Miss
Basia, tell them in the kitchen there! Take my plate back,
have them heat it up!”
Whereas he’d said he liked cold food. He was on a building
site, in the cafeteria, and he liked cold food. I don’t know if
anyone enjoyed their meal that day. I couldn’t even tell you
what the main course was. Probably meatballs, because we
mostly got meatballs. They were more breadcrumbs than
meat, but they were called meatballs.
You probably think she drove a dagger into my heart, as
they say. Well, it did hurt. I didn’t finish my main course. I
went back to work. Though I didn’t much feel like working
either. In the end I made myself feel better by saying I’d
wait him out. They’d install all the machinery in the cold
storage plant and he’d leave, and I’d still be there. I just had
to be patient. Besides, I found it hard to believe it could
have happened just like that on the first day. She’d given
him his soup and his main course, and that was that.
But from that day she changed beyond recognition. She
looked and she didn’t see. Even when you said to her, Good
morning, Miss Basia, or Basieńka, sometimes she didn’t
answer. When she gave us our plates it seemed like it was
all the same to her which of us was which. She knew the
cafeteria like the back of her hand, she could have found
her way among the tables blindfold, but she began to make
mistakes. The next table had been waiting longer than us,