The Carpenter: a Short Story
My father was a carpenter. There is no house on our street that does not have a table, shelf or chair made by his hands. High-quality oak, long-lasting, will probably last you two lifetimes. Once upon a time, he made me a perfect rocking horse for my birthday. Sturdy, light, reliable. In the meantime, I learned the trade myself, sanded countless display cases, tables, cabinets. Everything accumulated there. It’s like you get to know people’s souls, through your objects you enter their intimacy and keep their secrets, clothes, shoes, plates, glasses. They remain there as witnesses to what will be born in them, a new life given to them by those in whose rooms they stand. I never accept an order before I meet the client.
I made a crib for a newlywed couple for their first child. A daughter. Helena, with green eyes and skin as soft as Indian silk. Her restless little hands were able to turn everything around them into a toy for which only they see a purpose. Helena’s childish curiosity was disarming: I saw in her a blank sheet of paper. Innocent, shining like a pearl, something I no longer have the right to, because life has soiled me, and the same awaits her. At least while she’s in this bed, let her enjoy the ignorance of what can happen while you think you have all the time in the world. I painted the round bars white. Let them be like her, gentle to the touch, instead of sharp corners. She’ll have enough time to build them herself when she grows up.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I enjoy my job, it’s actually a calling. You see a studio in the forest, others see a shining cathedral of the past, its stained glass windows are leaves weaving the treetops into domes carved by the rays of the sun, as if they were a knife cutting freshly baked bread, still soft and hot. But the knives soon appeared, cutting everything in their path. Bells were replaced by ambulance sirens and soon, house roofs began to fall off, windows and doors burst. In that tornado of blood, everything else followed, a world disappeared as if carried away by a hand. Homes were left exposed to the mercy of the looters, who took everything, including things made in my father’s workshop, the birthplace of future memories, which would later turn out to be the birthplace of death.
When there was nothing left to steal, they would pluck flowers and spray graffiti that was supposed to preserve the memory of their madness. We took refuge in the house of an uncle who had already fled to Austria with his wife and children. Days passed in fear of the inevitability of horror, at every unfamiliar sound around the house we would flee to the basement which, just in case, was equipped with basic food supplies to last us at least one night. It was our Yekaterinburg, a prison without bars, and the world outside was full of drunken revolutionaries. That cathedral of the forest turned into a forest from Grimm’s fairy tales, where the only refuge is the house of the evil queen hurt by your beauty. Our peace feared their anger, its false security the last lie to save us, if we only believed it.
That’s what my father did, after the food ran out. He went to get it one day, and promised me all sorts of things. Chocolate, peppermint candies. The only thing he didn’t promise was that he would come back. Two days passed, then three, then four. There was no sign of him. My mother refused to accept the obvious, even though there was no time for sadness, only for fighting and surviving. First survive, then you’ll live through it. Don’t worry, hold on tight. I’m at my best when it’s time to panic, the calmest. It doesn’t help anyone, it doesn’t solve anything. When it’s all over, we’ll remember how brave we were and how long it took to endure what we didn’t deserve. Then we ran away, sleeping in houses without doors, on dusty mattresses, cooking chicken soup. he ones you only eat when you have a cold.
You could tell whose house we were in by the bookshelves. In each one I would come across something worth taking, but you could only take your own skin, everything else was a luxury for which there was no space or time. The encyclopedias were on a shelf that I recognized from our workshop and those were rare moments of laughter because it was as if my father was following me after all, saying “I haven’t really gone anywhere, because I’m all around you”. It was good to believe in such things, a lie dressed in pathos sometimes has the same effect on a bitter heart as the finest Belgian chocolate on a hungry person: a sweet deception that you consciously indulge in without thinking about the hangover of reality that will follow after the taste of nougat has sunk into your palate. Our short excursion out of cruelty turned into a weekend spent in a house on the lake with another family whose two sons and father had disappeared.
After that whole bloody circus ended, everything went back to the beginning like a movie, among the houses with new windows, barking of dogs whose owners had disappeared, until their bodies were found in a mass grave. Teams arrived to carefully dig out the remains of that stinking pogrom. The dead need the dignity that death did not grant them, so instead of cribs, my workshop started carving coffins. High-quality wood that would last forever. Day and night, new bones emerged from the workshop of death to be buried, each box was the final answer to the eternal question that won’t bring peace, but closure. When they recognized her in the pit, I made a white coffin for Helena with a heart-shaped inlay, as a final farewell to her little arms that didn’t get to hug enough.
That morning, Hasan from the nearby Roma settlement knocked on the workshop door. He looked for any job and people ignored him. Hasan did not beg. I fear nothing but hunger, he said. And those who work do not fear hunger. He had a wife and two sons, two boys, one of whom earned money by singing in the streets, dressed in a blue suit that was a too big for him. I was not lying when I told him that he did not have to look any further. The next day he came and started working. It is easy, there is not much to be smart about. It was easier with another pair of hands, but soon there was snide remarks about how unworthy beggar hands were carving coffins.
My mother subtly suggested I get rid of him, it was not good to upset people, you’ll never get rid of the stigma, she said. These people left their faces in pits full of their own shame and embarrassment, and now they are being roasted by anyone who pretends they don’t exist. He continued to come every day as if nothing had happened and as if his name was not at the same time an accusation against him that he could not defend himself from. Never humiliated and frightened, Hasan knew the workshop was a safe harbor where there was no storm of indifference waiting for him. Primarily because the house he lived in was a living embodiment of humiliation and insult, standing next to a pile of scrap metal they hadn’t yet managed to pawn. His wife, heavily pregnant, was at the table, peeling peas for lunch, next to a rope where freshly washed sheets smelled of fabric softener, fluttering like flags in the gentle wind.
My father told me about Saint Joseph, who was a carpenter like him. Do you think he ever carved the crosses on which criminals like his son would be crucified, the king of the downcast and weeping? Or carved the olive-wood bowls that the Pharisees and the apostles needed equally? I needed his hands, like Hasan’s, to tell the story of people who can no longer speak, because my coffins, made of varnished and warm wood, hold those who will not rise as quickly as the savior of the world. Resurrection was a promise fulfilled to the most patient of them. But somewhere along the way, he disappeared from the New Testament, just like all those former people in our lives. Until one day they knocked on my door with the news that my father’s remains had been found. I was no longer capable of tears, like pathologists accustomed to the formaldehyde that, like amber, preserves the clockwork mechanisms of human hearts. I only prayed that they would never find another bone that I would have to bury again.
One day Hasan did not come to work. I thought he was late, which happened from time to time, but I pretended it did not bother me. But another one passed, and he did not come again. I walked the streets angrily, staring into the eyes of all those who refused to look him in the eye, afraid that I would find him somewhere huddled and beaten. Ready for anything and furious as a dog, I finally went to the ghetto where they had made their home, the kind that Saint Joseph would probably find himself in if he came to this miserable shithole. There, in the garden by his house, the two of them were sitting with little Leonora. His wife gently held her , and the little girl was sucking his little finger. They brought out coffee and cookies. It was finally time feel alive, let the rest be done, at least today.
I returned to the workshop, where a new order was already waiting for me. Four coffins, with brass handles, no ornaments.Before I started working, I took the wood that had been piled up since winter, unused in the pantry where my father kept things no longer fit for any purpose except as a memory. I took everything out to sand, cut, carve, paint. It was a crib, varnished white, for another little hand, for a happy ending. On the headboard, carved in curly letters, the name “Leonora”. A small house for the big dreams of a flower bud. Love is always pathetic when it is sincere. The time for blood is past. Now, finally, is the time for pathos again.
