Colours of a Summer

More or less midway through the 1980s, I was standing in front of my college, quite nervously, trying to find myself in my suit, which seemed to be shrinking from year to year. It had been bought for my high school finals, so it would be extremely ungrateful to level excessive demands, or, even worse, unjustified charges against it. It was what it was, the only type you could get at the time. I wore it as I made my way through examination life, and, like a most faithful companion, it accompanied me in my university battles.

Now, however, as I held the diploma that certified graduation, I felt that the suit was somehow choking me. That can’t have had much to do with reality, yet became something of a symbol. Was I not expected to feel a journeyman who, on that day, was granted the freedom of the craft of sports education? Not to mention a liberated man? The cards – and that’s what diplomas are – had been dealt, and, to me and my colleagues, the university was becoming nothing more than a memory of the “chill of the lecture rooms”, as a song popular at the time called them. It was time to join the fray.

But we did have some choice, even if was a bit like Henry Ford’s words in the famous anecdote: any colour as long as it’s black. However, if you were to transfer it to the drab and bleak, no-frills existence under communism, the colour would quite likely be grey.

Because communism was not red. Communism was grey. We wore grey clothes, we lived in grey houses, and rather than ageing, our skins turned grey.

Yet I was loath to turn grey.

Once I reached home, I took off the suit and jumped into Polish-made jeans, fondly called “Texas”, obsessively checking my pocket with a thin wad of well-worn Deutschmarks in it. In my mind, I called it the key to a new life, even if in reality it was to prove no more than the opener to several bottles of Coke.

In any case, I found myself amid the picturesque nature of Black Forest, as I found black a little better than grey. For whole days, I dedicated myself to pursuing the intricacies of cutting and trimming timber and arranging it in proper stacks. The West, mythical to me at the moment, didn’t dazzle me with colours, quite likely because I was focused on the aforementioned cutting and arranging.

Things were working out nicely with Horst, the owner of the little lumber company. I mean, I worked with lumber, and Horst looked on and handed out praise. He was a kind and good man, even if I found some of his business moves highly puzzling.

“We took such a long road to buy two batches of timber?” I once asked him while loading. We had around two hours’ drive back home ahead of us. “Savings”, he shrugged. “It’s all for the sake of savings”.

The boss is the boss, but even bosses are known to make mistakes.

“So how much have we saved?” Horst paused the loading. “About 25 marks.” I turned my head. “And the cost of petrol? And your time?”

Horst stood in deep thought, for a moment turning into a Horst statue. Turns out I was right after all.

You can learn the skill of good, reliable work, but also of business thinking, at any place and at any time. It’s not just that you can: you should! Anyway, not every saving pays.

Someone might raise the question of whether this is where the money for the first business came from. Was it from arranging planks? Yet my answer will be a categorical “no”. The money was not of that order. Instead, I gained something more valuable: experience and contacts that began to pay off several years later. And I treated them both as a certain capital.

The Black Forest summer was fading away. With the arrival of smoky airs and steadily dropping temperatures, the meadows and trees on the mountains changed colour. Winter was coming. In Poland, you could also feel something coming to an end. Yet at that time no one in Poland could so much as guess that the grey days would end just a few years later.

All that was left was to wait patiently for the spring.