Which Trace of Your Last Day Do You Still Carry?

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The Unfinished Letter

The person with whom the story never ended

The bell of the little church strikes five as you step out of the bookshop and see him on the other side of the street. It has been raining since morning, the stones under your feet are shining, carriage wheels splash mud, and the bakery on the corner smells of bread and cinnamon. He is under the eaves opposite you, in the dark coat you would recognize from far away, and he looks at you as if the two of you were the only people on the street. Of course, you aren’t. In this town there is always at least one neighbor who has no business being right there, yet knows remarkably well who passed whom and how long they looked at each other.

In this life you are a young woman of twenty-eight, living at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a modest European town by a river. Your family is well off, the house is beautiful, you have servants, books, fine porcelain and parents who have planned your future in considerable detail. The only thing they left out of this wonderful plan was asking whether you liked it. You are expected to marry well, stay close to the family and in time run a household of your own with the same confidence with which your mother runs this one. For a long time you believed that is probably exactly how it would go, until one afternoon you reach for a book in the little bookshop on the square and another hand reaches for the same one.

He lets you have the book and says he will take it next week, as long as you promise not to mark the ending with a pencil. You laugh, because that is exactly what you do with books, though you have no idea how he could know. A week later you meet again in the bookshop. By the third time, both of you understand that chance has started trying far too hard.

He is a little older than you, educated, and works with his father in a trading office. He has neither the fortune nor the family name your parents would consider suitable, but he has a habit of listening when you speak, and that turns out to be much more dangerous. He tells you about the cities he has seen through his father’s work, about the sea you have never seen, and about a house with big windows that he wants to have one day. You admit to him that you want to travel, although your mother considers this a splendid pastime for people who lack a decent home to sit in.

Your meetings slowly grow more frequent. You walk along the same street at the same hour and, in front of other people, exchange a few perfectly innocent words. The real conversations are in the letters. A trusted person carries them between you, and in the evening, when the house falls quiet, you read them by candlelight in your room. Soon you can tell his mood by his handwriting alone. When he is excited, the lines drift slightly upward; when he is angry, he presses the pen so hard that the ink nearly goes through the paper. He also has a habit that makes you laugh at first — he always folds down the top right corner of the sheet before putting it in the envelope.

Your letters are longer. In the evening you write boldly; in the morning you reread what you wrote and half your courage has mysteriously vanished. You cross out a few lines, then copy them out again, because those are exactly the lines you want him to read. A letter travels for days between you, and the answer as long again, so today’s luxury of deciding after half an hour of silence that the other person has obviously lost interest is completely unknown to you. You know how to wait. Only, with time, you begin waiting for something more than a letter.

After nearly a year he gets the chance to work in another city. He wants to go first, get settled and then find a way for the two of you to be together. In the letters you are already discussing a very real life: a small home, your journey there, the money you will need, even the books you absolutely must bring. The plan is daring for your time and your position, but at twenty-eight a person has the wonderful ability to believe that if two people want something badly enough, the world will sooner or later come to its senses.

The world does not.

One of the letters falls into your mother’s hands. She doesn’t make a scene. That would almost be easier. The next day your father calls you into his study and the conversation is short. He explains that the relationship is over, that the man is not suitable for you and that in a few weeks you will be going to stay with relatives. That evening you find a way to send one last message. He has already left, but he leaves his address and two words that you will remember much longer than you imagine at the time: “I’ll wait.”

You write to him as soon as you arrive at your relatives’ house. Then you write again. Weeks go by with no answer. You try through your mutual friend and learn that the first letter probably never arrived. You send a second one to the office address. That one also goes unanswered. In time a rumor reaches you that he has gone even farther away for work. Someone else claims he has fallen ill. Nobody knows enough, and everybody knows a little, which is almost the worst possible way to wait for someone.

The months pass and slowly you begin to understand that the hardest part is no longer the separation itself. The hardest part is that the story has no ending. You don’t know whether he received even one of your letters. You don’t know whether he waited and decided that you had given up. You don’t know whether he wrote and his letters were intercepted. You don’t know whether he chose a different life. You have dozens of versions and not a single truth.

A little over two years after he left, you return to your hometown. Your life is different now, but the box of letters comes back with you. You keep it in the bottom drawer of your desk and rarely open it. You can walk past the bookshop without expecting to see him, but you still cannot accept the thought that such an important story ended without either of you knowing exactly how.

In winter you fall seriously ill. At first everyone is sure you will recover, and after a few weeks you begin to believe it too. On your last day you even feel better. Spring is already in the air and you ask for the window to be opened. You hear horses’ hooves on the street, the voices of people below and the bell marking the same hours by which you once counted your meetings with him.

In the afternoon you are left alone and you open the bottom drawer. You take out the box, unfold his first letter and then the last. The paper has gone soft from rereading, the ink has faded, and the top right corner is still folded down in his old habit. You touch it with your finger and for a moment you are back in front of the bookshop, it is raining, he is across the street and the two of you have all the time in the world.

Then you take a clean sheet of paper.

This time you are no longer writing to get an answer. You simply want to tell the ending from your side. You write that you never stopped replying, that you sent letters, that you waited and that you never found out what became of him. You tell him about the years since, and at one point you smile, because you remember how he was always late for your meetings. You once told him that one day he would make you wait for him your whole life. Back then you both laughed.

You reach the last paragraph and begin the sentence you never wrote in the old letters. You always believed that one day you would say it in person. You write the first words, but your hand is already tired, and you set the pen down beside the inkwell. You decide you will finish the letter in the morning. After so many years of waiting, one night seems like nothing.

The next morning the woman who takes care of you comes into the room and sees the open window, the burnt-out candle and the sheet of paper on the desk. Beside it are the old letters, tied with a faded ribbon. She reads the name of the person the new letter was meant for, but there is no address to send it to. She folds the sheet and puts it away with the others.

The last sentence remains unfinished.

The trace in your life today

If you chose exactly this image, the trace we are looking for is connected to a story without a final conversation. In your life today, silence probably weighs more than an unpleasant truth. You can bear “I don’t want to”, “it’s over” or “I chose something else”, however much it hurts, because at least you know what you are dealing with. Much harder is “we’ll see”, the sudden drifting away, and the person who simply stops talking.

That is when your mind easily turns into a small detective agency. You replay the last conversation, check where the tone changed, wonder why last week there were two exclamation marks and now there are none, and you can find meaning even in a single full stop after “good night”. Behind this, though, lies something deeper: for you, relationships end much harder when clarity is missing. An open ending keeps taking up part of your attention, because you are still waiting for the last page.

You may also recognize the other side of this trace. Someone comes into your life and the closeness arrives far too quickly for the time you have known each other. You don’t yet have enough shared memories, and already you miss the person. The conversation flows with the ease of a continuation, as if you had started in the middle and neither of you needed the first chapter. If, while reading this result, a particular face has already appeared in your mind, remember it. That is exactly where the story becomes interesting.

If you want to do something with this trace right now, take a sheet of paper and write that person a letter you don’t necessarily have to send. Begin with: “If I knew this was the last letter I could write to you, I would tell you…” and keep going until you reach the thing you usually edit, keep quiet about or save for the right moment. Then read what you have written and notice which sentence was hardest to put on paper. That is the one that deserves your attention.

And if you want to open more of this old story, continue to the Tarot spread “My Last Day in a Past Life”. There we will look for who you were, who the person from the letters was, what really separated you, what became of him after your last meeting and how this thread plays a part in your life now. And if one face refuses to leave your thoughts while you read, remember exactly that one, because the next question is far more intriguing: did your story begin with the first meeting in this life, or did you simply recognize each other again?

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The Two Cups

The person you waited for

Even before you open your eyes, you know what the sea is doing. On quiet mornings you can hear the separate voices from the harbor, cart wheels on the cobblestones and the gulls, who from dawn onward have something to say to the whole town. When the wind comes off the water, the ropes knock against the masts and the sound reaches your room on the second floor. You open the wooden shutters, breathe in the smell of salt, wet stone and warm bread from the bakery on the lower street, and look between the roofs toward the harbor. This is part of your morning, like the coffee, your mother’s voice from downstairs and the little bell above the shop door.

In this life you are a young woman living in the middle of the nineteenth century in a small port town on the Adriatic. Your family’s house is on a steep street above the water, where in the mornings the merchants set their goods out in front of their doors, in the afternoons the women talk through the windows, and in the evenings the smell of coffee and wood smoke mingles with the sea air. Downstairs you have a shop selling fabric, thread, buttons and ribbons, and above it are the rooms where you grew up. Your father finds it hard to spend a whole day behind the counter now, and little by little you have taken over almost everything, although your mother remains convinced that every decision in the house, the shop and probably half the town would be wiser if it were discussed with her first.

You like the work, and you know the customers so well that from the doorway you can tell which woman will ask for the most expensive fabric and then complain about the price, which one will choose the same color as her neighbor and afterward swear she has never seen the neighbor’s dress, and which man will come in saying “I need something for my wife”, as if that already described the color, the material, the quantity and the occasion. One such man walks into the shop shortly after a merchant ship arrives and asks for fabric for his mother. He has no idea what color she likes, doesn’t know what she is going to sew, and when you ask at least how old she is, he thinks for so long that you almost ask whether the two of them have ever met. In the end he points to a bright green silk, and you tell him it is lovely if his mother has long dreamed of being noticed from the other end of the harbor. He bursts out laughing, your father peeks out of the back room, and you choose him a far more suitable fabric.

The next day the sailor comes back for thread, a day later he suddenly needs a ribbon, and by the end of the week it is obvious that if the ship stays another month, he will have to buy half the shop to keep finding decent reasons to come in. He is a little older than you and sails on a merchant ship between various Mediterranean ports. When he leaves the first time, you think there has been one lovely week between you that you will someday remember with a smile. A few months later, however, the ship comes into the harbor again, and that same day he appears in the shop, tanned by the sun, with oranges under his arm and as naturally as if he had stepped out the previous afternoon.

From then on your life together begins to move between his departures and his returns. From his voyages he brings small things that gradually fill your room — a piece of blue glass, a foreign coin, dried fruit, a little box of spice that your mother first declares dreadful and a week later is putting into almost everything. When he is in town, you sit in the evening at the small table by the window and drink coffee. He tells you about Alexandria, Corfu and Trieste, about markets where languages you have never heard are spoken all at once, and about storms at sea, which he invariably describes as “nothing special”, even though with every retelling the waves grow taller. You tell him who got married, who went bankrupt, who is once again not speaking to his own brother, and why the neighbor across the street keeps moving the flowerpots in front of your house when she thinks nobody is watching.

There are two cups on the table, and his is always empty first. You often tell him that a man capable of crossing half the Mediterranean could find ten minutes to drink a coffee like a normal person, and he promises he will learn when he stops sailing. Gradually that “when” begins to look like a real plan. He wants to make a few more voyages, save enough and start a small trade on land. You will marry, expand the shop, he will handle the deliveries and you the customers. You are already arguing about where the bigger table will go, how many rooms you need and why he absolutely insists on a blue front door just because he saw one on some island. The future gradually takes on so many details that you begin to feel it as a place the two of you simply haven’t reached yet.

One of his next voyages is meant to be his last long absence. The ship will sail south, unload its cargo, take on a new one and return in three or four months. The evening before he leaves you are again at the small table, and beside his cup lies the old brass compass he usually carries with him. When he gets up, he leaves it with you and tells you to keep it until he returns. You laugh that a sailor without a compass is hardly the most convincing person to trust with a ship, but he has already decided that this object belongs to your future home. The next morning you see him off at the harbor amid the usual bustle of crates, ropes, sailors and late cargo, and before the ship pulls away from the quay he promises that next time he is coming home to you for good. You believe him quite naturally, because until now he has always left and always come back.

The end of summer comes without the ship. At first nobody sees any reason for worry, because routes change, cargo gets delayed and the weather can slow a ship down for weeks. After a month you start asking what is expected from the south, and after two you can already recognize some ships by their masts. Then a captain you know comes into the shop and says that in Corfu he heard about a strong storm along the route. The ship your man was on was probably damaged, but according to the news it stayed afloat. Later another sailor has heard that part of the crew reached a foreign port, then someone says the ship was repaired, and a third is sure that sailors from it boarded other vessels. None of these stories gives you an answer, but each has one small detail that keeps you believing he may come back.

Meanwhile your life goes on. You open the shop in the morning, spread the fabrics on the counter, cut, measure, count, argue with suppliers, look after your parents, go visiting and laugh with friends. Anyone who saw you during the day would hardly guess that you are waiting for a man who vanished somewhere between two ports. Only when a ship’s bell rings out over the water does your hand pause for a moment on the fabric and your eyes find the window on their own. In the first year you go down to the quay for almost every ship from the south, in the second you go only when someone brings news, and by the third you stay in the shop, because you know the arrival times without looking.

The second cup stays too. At first you set it out only on days when you expect a ship, because you imagine the door opening, him dropping his luggage on the floor and starting to explain why a four-month voyage lasted a year. Gradually the cup becomes part of the evening. Once a neighbor asks why you keep setting it out, and you answer that you have plenty of cups. She looks at you, you look back at her, and the conversation ends with a silent agreement that this explanation is bad enough not to be worth discussing further.

In the fourth year, a man you have known since childhood starts coming to the shop more often. His workshop is two streets down, and for years your family has called him whenever a latch breaks, a shelf sags or some cupboard decides it no longer wishes to be a cupboard. He brings apples for your mother, plays cards with your father and always finds work for his hands. If he says he will come in the afternoon, he comes in the afternoon, and if he promises to fix something, the next day it is fixed. Over time you begin to look forward to his visits in a completely different way, because with him there is no ship, storm or rumor to come between his words and his arrival.

One day you close the shop together and he makes you laugh so much that only in the evening do you realize you haven’t looked toward the harbor once the whole afternoon. That unsettles you more than you expect. A few months later he asks you to marry him, and for the first time in years a future appears before you that doesn’t have to arrive by ship. You can imagine the home, the children, the evenings, your father with his cards and your mother, who will probably start bossing your new husband around even before the wedding. You like this man, life with him feels light, and you know you could be happy, so you ask for a few days to think.

Exactly during those days a sailor turns up in the harbor who once sailed the same route. He has heard that after the storm part of the crew survived and reached another shore, but he doesn’t know the names and can’t say what happened next. For anyone else this would be almost no information at all, but for you it is enough to bring back that old “maybe”. If the man you are waiting for is alive and one day comes home, how will you look at him and tell him you stopped waiting just before he returned? You turn down the proposal. The man from the workshop hears you out calmly and only asks whether you are still waiting for the sailor. You can’t give him a clear answer, because by now even you don’t know whether you are waiting for the man himself, for his promise, or for the life the two of you described in such detail that over the years it began to seem almost like something you had already had.

In time the man from the workshop marries another woman. He still greets your parents, comes when your father needs help, and one day you see him on the square with a small child in his arms. You smile at each other, and as you watch them walk on down the street, you understand something you never thought about in the first years of waiting: the time has not been empty. While you were expecting one life to come back to you, other possible lives were passing by your door and going on their way.

The fifth winter is unusually cold, and many people in town fall ill. For you it starts with a cough and a high fever, then come weeks when one day you seem to be recovering and the next you don’t even have the strength to go down to the shop. When April comes you spend almost all your time in your room, and your mother no longer talks about the day you will be back behind the counter. Instead she tells you what is happening downstairs, who came in, what fabric was delivered and how outrageously the price has gone up, as if all these ordinary details could keep the life you have always known around you a little longer.

One morning you wake to sunlight on the blanket and ask for the window to be opened. The sea air comes into the room together with the voices from the street and the noise of the harbor, and while your mother is telling you the news from the shop, she mentions that a ship is expected from the south in the afternoon, one that hasn’t come to town for years. After so much time you both know what news like this means to you, and the conversation simply goes on. On the table by the window is the old brass compass. The metal has darkened, the glass is scratched, and when you take it in your hand you remember how you once thought you would be keeping it for only a few months.

In the afternoon you hear the ship’s bell, then the voices in the street and the footsteps of people going down to the water. Between the roofs you can see the tops of the masts, and the town gradually fills with that particular excitement an arriving ship brings. You ask your mother for coffee, and when she sets the cup in front of you, you ask her to bring a second one too. She comes back without questions, and you place the compass beside the empty place opposite, exactly where his hand used to be. From the street come names, laughter and greetings, people are carrying their luggage home, someone runs up the steps, and every time footsteps come near the house, your eyes move to the door.

The light slowly creeps across the wall, the coffee in the other cup goes cold, and you keep listening. After so many years, the man you waited for seems very close again. You imagine him asking about the shop, someone pointing him to the steep street, him climbing the same stone steps and stopping in front of the door, older, changed by the years, but with the same smile. Maybe he will look at the cup and laugh that you knew when to make coffee after all. Maybe he will ask for his compass first. Maybe he will finally tell you where he has been all this time and why none of those contradictory reports ever managed to reach the truth.

When your mother comes into the room in the evening, one cup is almost empty, the other is untouched, and the old compass lies beside it. The next morning the town is already talking about the ship that arrived, about the people who came off it and the stories they brought back after their long absence, but this news no longer reaches you. Your last day ends with the same feeling you have lived with for the past years — that the man may be very close, that the next footsteps on the street may be his, and that all that is left is to wait just a little longer.

“Just a little longer and you’ll come.”

The trace in your life today

If you chose the two cups, you may recognize this trace in your present life too. When someone has given you a promise and there is still a reason why it hasn’t been kept, you know how to give time — to the person, to the circumstances, to the difficult period, to the decision that hasn’t been made yet. One month becomes three, then comes the next date and the next explanation, and each of them on its own can sound perfectly reasonable. That is how waiting gradually stops having a clear end and becomes part of everyday life, just as the second cup once became part of that table by the sea.

In this story the words were spoken. There was a promise of return, a shared home and a life that two people had already begun to plan. The trace lies in waiting for the words to finally become action. That is why it can show up in love with someone who is not yet ready for the relationship you want, but you may also recognize it in a job that is always about to start, in a move that has been postponed to next year for a year now, or in a dream of your own for which you are waiting for a better moment. And precisely because there is always a reason to give a little more time, it can be hard to notice when the waiting has started taking time from your own life.

The ability to keep a place for someone is precious. It speaks of loyalty, patience and the fact that you don’t throw away important relationships at the first difficulty. The old life by the sea, though, leaves another question as well: what happens to you during the time you are waiting? In that life there was the man from the workshop, a family that could have been created, and years that went on bringing their own possibilities. Your present story may be completely different, but the question is still useful: is there something you keep leaving for after the return, after the decision, after the change, after that “soon” that keeps moving a little further away?

If this image immediately reminded you of a particular person or something you have been waiting for a long time, set two cups in front of you. Let one be the life you already have, and the other what you are waiting for to arrive. Look at them for a while and ask yourself just one question: if a year from now the second cup is still empty, what do I not want to have missed during that year? You don’t need to decide anything right away. It is enough, for a little while, to turn your eyes from the harbor to the person who has been at the table all along — you.

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The Medallion

The promise you took with you

In this house nobody wakes up wondering what they feel like doing today. Even before breakfast there is water to carry, animals to feed, wood to chop and at least one child who can’t find something that is almost certainly right in front of their eyes. You live in the nineteenth century in a small mountain village where the stone houses cling to the slope, winter buries the road to the valley, and people know who is ill, who is getting married and who has bought a new cow before the family itself has had a chance to share the news. Your home has two rooms, a low ceiling and a yard that in summer is full of hens, firewood, laundry and children. You are the eldest son, and early on you learned that in a big family the word “older” mostly means “go and see what’s happening”.

Your father works in the forest, and your mother runs the house and everyone in it with that incredible ability to knead bread, stop a quarrel between two children and tell from the noise outside which hen has once again decided to live as a free person, all at the same time. You have two brothers and two sisters, and the youngest still sleeps next to your mother when you begin going with your father for firewood. At fifteen you are already doing a grown man’s work and see nothing special in it. In the evenings there are so many of you around the table that someone always sits crooked, someone reaches across another’s plate, and your mother threatens at least once that if everyone talks at the same time, she will start serving dinner to each person separately. Nobody believes she will.

One autumn your father doesn’t come home from the forest. Other men carry him back toward evening after an accident, and in the following days the house fills with people, food, quiet conversations and neighbor women who seem to know what needs to be done while the family doesn’t yet know what to do with its grief. After the funeral everyone gradually leaves, the dishes are put away, the chairs are returned to their places, and one evening you look at the table where your mother and your four younger brothers and sisters are sitting and understand that from the next morning their life will depend on you too.

You start working wherever there is pay. You go to the forest, help a carpenter, in summer you work other people’s fields, and when merchants head down to the town you go with them for a few coins for the loading and the road. Your mother sews, tends the animals and sells whatever you can spare. You live hard, but in those years there is much more than work. You laugh, argue, celebrate; your youngest brother manages to tear his only decent pair of trousers right before a church feast, and your sister secretly cuts a piece out of your shirt to make a dress for her doll and is then genuinely surprised that you noticed. You come home from the market with honey cakes for the children, and the youngest starts greeting you out in the yard with such devotion that according to your mother it is obvious how much she loves her brother, while according to you her love smells suspiciously often of honey.

The years pass and gradually you begin earning more. A timber merchant from the nearby town gives you steady work, because you know how to count, you don’t lose goods, and if you promise delivery on Wednesday, nobody needs to ask whether you might have meant some other Wednesday. For the first time there are periods when the money is enough. One brother starts learning a trade, your older sister is already thinking about marriage, the little ones go to school, and you feel real pride when you look at them. They are your people. You love them, and everything you do for them has meaning.

Then the merchant offers to take you with him to a bigger town on the plain, where he is opening a new warehouse. You would earn almost double, have a room of your own, and if the business goes well, you might in time become a partner. You come home with this news and think about it all evening. For the first time an opportunity appears that belongs to you alone. A few days later your mother falls ill.

At first everyone expects her to get better, and she most of all. She keeps giving instructions from her bed, and once she gets so angry about flour that was put away wrongly that you decide a person with so much energy for other people’s mistakes has no intention whatsoever of dying. But winter moves on, she grows weaker, and one evening she calls you to her when the others are already asleep. She takes from her neck a small medallion on a thin chain that you have seen on her since you were a child. Inside is a tiny image of a saint and a faded scrap of paper that came from her own mother. She places it in your hand, glances toward the other room and asks you not to leave the little ones until they can manage on their own. You close your fingers around the medallion and promise: “I’ll take care of them.”

Your mother dies before the end of winter, and you stay.

In the first years there is nothing to choose. Your brothers and sisters really do need you, and you do what you promised. One brother finishes his trade, you help your sister with her wedding, the other keeps going to school. You work more, negotiate better pay, repair the house and in the evenings check whether there is enough flour for next week. The medallion is under your shirt, and over time you almost stop feeling it. It is simply there, like the promise.

At the market in the neighboring village you meet a woman who sells herbs, dried fruit and homemade ointments together with her aunt. Your first conversations are about prices and goods, then they start continuing even after there is nothing sensible left to buy. She quickly understands this and one day asks you how much dried mint one person can use before he turns into tea himself. After that there is little point pretending you come for the mint.

With her you begin to imagine a home of your own. Neither big nor rich — two rooms, a small yard, a table that wasn’t left by your parents, and evenings when you come home to someone who chose to live with you. You go to see a house on the edge of town. In the yard there is an old apple tree leaning so hard that, according to the woman, it will fall with the first snow, and according to you, with a little care it could last for years. She looks at you and says that you are exactly the kind of man who would buy a house because of a tree that needs saving. You laugh, because you suspect she knows you better than you would like.

Just then your youngest brother loses his job and comes home. Your sister is also going through a hard year, and the roof of the family house has to be replaced before winter. The money you had been setting aside for your own home gradually goes to all of this. Nobody takes it from you and nobody insists that you give up your plans. You decide yourself that the house can wait a year. Then another.

The woman from the market sees more clearly than you what is happening. One day she tells you that poverty doesn’t frighten her and she doesn’t expect you to bring her to a ready home. She only wants to know whether a day will ever come when your life together has its own place too, instead of always beginning after the last of other people’s needs. You can’t give her an answer you believe yourself.

Some time later you learn that she has married. That evening you sit in front of the family house and look for a long time at the lights on the opposite slope. You aren’t angry with her. You know she had every right to move on. Your hand unconsciously finds the medallion under your shirt, and for the first time you ask yourself when exactly the promise to take care of your own stopped being a task for the hard years and turned into the way you live.

More time passes, and everyone you worried about gradually finds their own way. One brother has his own workshop, the other lives in the town and earns well, your sisters have families. The youngest, who once waited for you for honey cakes, now brings her own children to the old house, and they run after you with the same conviction that a person coming back from the market is morally obliged to bring something sweet. On holidays the table is full again, only now someone else brings the food, someone else chops the wood and someone else pays before you manage to take out your purse.

It turns out this is the hardest thing to get used to. If someone has already lit the fire, you look for something else that needs doing. If your brother says he will pay for the repair, you start to argue. When your sister brings food, your first reaction is to tell her it wasn’t necessary. For years you knew who you were by the fact that others relied on you, and now that they can take care of themselves, you keep looking for what else you owe them.

Your last winter comes early. You are an old man now, and the family house has become too big for one person, though you would never admit such a thing to your relatives. They come often, but you still stack firewood for weeks ahead, check the roof before every snowfall and keep in a chest money, documents and notes about who should get what if something happens to you. Your brother jokes that you will probably keep giving them instructions even after you die, and you reply that if that is the only way they will finally start listening, then so be it.

One morning snow buries the yard and you don’t have the strength to get out of bed. At noon your youngest sister arrives, a woman with silver in her hair by now, with a basket of food and an armful of firewood, even though yours reaches almost to the roof of the shed. She scolds you for being alone the night before, straightens your blanket, puts the soup on to warm and starts telling you about her children, your brothers, the nephews and nieces and the latest family quarrel, which according to her is enormous and according to you will be forgotten by Sunday.

As she talks, she notices the medallion on your chest. She hasn’t seen it up close for years, and when she picks it up, she recognizes it at once. You ask whether she remembers that it belonged to your mother. She nods, and for the first time you tell her about that winter evening when your mother put it in your hand and asked you to look after them until they could manage on their own.

Your sister looks at you for a few seconds. Then she looks at the yard, at the chopped wood she has just brought you, at the soup on the stove, and back at you.

“But we grew up a long time ago.”

You laugh, and suddenly you see the whole family differently. Your brother in his own workshop, your sisters in their homes, the children who now have children of their own, the holiday table where someone else insists on paying, and all those times in recent years when you refused help from the very people you once promised to protect. They really have grown up. Long ago.

After your sister leaves, you stay by the window with the medallion in your hand. You remember your mother, your father, the noisy table, the little feet around the yard, the woman from the market and the house with the old apple tree. For the first time you see your promise whole — the years when it kept the family together, and the years after, when the family could already have held you up too. You have fulfilled what you promised. Perhaps a very long time ago.

In the evening the snow keeps falling, and the lights of the other houses twinkle along the slope. In them live the people you once led by the hand, fed, protected and sent off into their own lives. Now they have their own homes, children, cares and hands strong enough to carry their own load. The medallion lies in your palm, and for the first time in decades you are not thinking about what else you need to do for someone. You are thinking how strange it is that you have understood only now: the promise had an end.

The next morning your sister finds you in bed. The medallion is still in your hand, but your fingers are no longer closed around it. Your palm is open.

“I haven’t fulfilled my duty yet.” That is the feeling you carried for so long that it stayed with you even after the reason for it was gone.

The trace in your life today

If you chose the medallion, you may recognize this thread in your present life too. You often see what needs to be done before anyone asks. If someone close to you has a problem, you start thinking about how to solve it; if someone has no strength left, you take on more; if the family needs time, money, organization or a person to gather up what has been scattered, it easily turns out to be you. You can be very good at giving and rather clumsy when the roles are reversed and someone wants to take care of you.

This old trace is felt most strongly when your own wishes and the needs of those close to you head in different directions. You may want a change, a relationship, a journey, a project of your own, a new home or simply more time for yourself, and immediately find one more thing that has to be sorted out first. After it comes the next one. The people around you may long since be capable of making their own decisions, bearing the consequences and even helping you, while you keep feeling that if you let go, something important will be left uncared for.

There is also a beautiful inheritance in the medallion. You carry loyalty, endurance and the ability to stay by your people when life gets hard. The question is whether caring is still your free choice, or whether somewhere deep inside you believe that first everyone else must be fine and only then comes your turn. Because that turn can be postponed for a very long time, especially when there will always be someone you love whom you could help.

If this image is yours, take a medallion, a ring, a coin, a pebble or another small object and close it in your palm. Think of the people you most often take responsibility for, and of what you believe you still have to do before you allow yourself your own. Then open your hand and ask yourself: “Is it possible that the promise has already been fulfilled and I am still living by it?” If the answer is “yes”, your love for your people stays exactly the same. Maybe they are simply walking on their own now, and it is time to see where you want to go.

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Image 4

The Child’s Toy

Someone you left behind

Every morning begins with the same argument about hair. Your daughter is six and utterly convinced that brushing is a pointless human invention created solely to ruin children’s moods before breakfast. You sit her on the little stool by the window, she solemnly promises not to move, and ten seconds later she is already twisting around because she has spotted something interesting in the street. Then come the socks, the one shoe that invariably disappears exactly when you need to leave, and the little cloth rabbit without which she refuses to leave the house. The rabbit has one ear slightly shorter, because she once tried to “give it a haircut” herself, and one of its legs has been sewn back on so many times that it is hard to tell what it originally looked like. To everyone else it is an old toy; to her it is a member of the family with a character, opinions and every right to be present at dinner.

You live at the beginning of the twentieth century in a large European city, in a neighborhood where in the mornings the trams clatter along the rails, the shopkeepers raise their shutters and the bakery on the corner smells of warm bread before the street has filled with people. Your apartment is small, with two rooms and a kitchen whose window looks onto an inner courtyard, where the neighbors know more about each other than anyone would willingly tell them. For a few years now it has been just the two of you. Her father died when she was so small that her memories of him are made up mostly of your stories and one photograph on the cupboard, and your life has gradually found its rhythm around work, the child and all the small tasks that make up an ordinary day.

You work in a dressmaker’s workshop a few streets from home, and it was there that you made the rabbit when your daughter was two. A piece of soft pale fabric was left over from one dress, a small piece of blue from another for its little jacket, and you embroidered the eyes with black thread one evening after the child had fallen asleep. You never imagined that four years later you would still be mending the same rabbit, because its owner drags it down the stairs, feeds it real porridge, sets it at the window to look out and once bathed it in a basin to find out whether it could swim. It turned out it couldn’t, but according to your daughter the fault lay in the wrong technique, so the question apparently remains open.

In the mornings you leave the child with the elderly woman in the next apartment, who looks after two other children as well and regularly announces that the three of them will send her to an early grave, although she feeds them as if her main goal were to double their size. After work you pick up your daughter and walk home, and she talks almost the whole way — who quarreled with whom, what she drew, why in her opinion pigeons never go to work, and how one day she will have a dog, a cat and a horse. When you ask where exactly you will keep the horse, given that you live on the second floor, she looks at you with the pity of someone who is obviously dealing with an adult without any imagination, and you understand that this problem will have to remain unsolved for now.

On Sundays you go to the park, you buy her a small bun if the week has been good, and she runs after the pigeons and insists on walking past the cabs to see the horses. One day, as you cross the big boulevard, she pulls her hand out of yours and announces that she is big now and can walk by herself. You allow her exactly three steps, then a tram approaches and you take hold of her again. She protests, you promise her that one day she will cross without you, and from her expression you understand that in her view that day could easily be tomorrow. In the evenings the argument continues in another form — after the washing and the inevitable battle with the hair comes the bedtime story, which is never just one. When you say it is late, the negotiations begin: half a story, a really short one, just the beginning, just to find out who is in the forest. In the end you almost always read more than you meant to, while the rabbit lies by the pillow and, according to your daughter, listens too.

This is your life, and you love it exactly as it is. There are bills, tiredness, dresses that must be ready by Friday and children’s shoes that seem to shrink by themselves overnight, but there is also that small hand that automatically finds yours in the street. There is a little person who falls asleep every evening sure that as long as you are in the next room, everything important in the world is more or less in its place, and you don’t even stop to think how much trust there is in that simple feeling.

Then the city begins to change. At first the change comes through the grown-ups’ conversations — men linger at the newspaper kiosks, people speak more quietly on the tram, rumors appear of clashes, closed roads and soldiers moving toward the city. In the workshop the women argue whether it will all be over in a few days or whether it is time for families to send their children to relatives outside the city. You keep working, buying bread, fetching the child, brushing her hair and reading the story, because everyday life has an astonishing ability to go on even when everyone can feel something around it beginning to crack.

After a few weeks the schools close, there are more soldiers in the streets, the windows must be blacked out at night, and families with suitcases begin to gather at the station. Your older sister lives with her husband and children in a small town far from the main roads, and she writes asking you to send your daughter to them. They have room, the children will be together and it is safer there, but your first reaction is to refuse, because for six years you have been the person who knows where your child is, what she has eaten, why she is crying and whether she is covered at night, and now every sensible argument leads to one and the same decision — to send her far away from you.

One night you are woken by a loud noise a few streets away. The windows tremble, your daughter jumps out of bed and comes to you with the rabbit pressed to her chest. You sit on the floor by the inner wall while outside there are shouts and running people, and she asks whether you are scared. You say no, after which she declares that she isn’t scared at all either, and from the way her fingers are digging into your arm you understand that you are both lying for the same reason. The next morning you write to your sister that you will send the child.

You yourself will stay a little longer. The workshop is now sewing clothes, sheets and linen for the hospital, there is a great deal of work, and the elderly neighbor has no family and flatly refuses to leave her apartment. Besides, you believe the separation will last only a few weeks. You will send your daughter somewhere safe, finish the work, settle things with the apartment and join her. You repeat this plan so often that gradually you begin to treat it almost as an appointment with the future.

Your daughter takes the journey as an adventure, because she doesn’t yet understand what the blacked-out windows, the soldiers and the conversations the grown-ups break off when she comes into the room mean. You start packing her little suitcase, and she insists on taking three books, two pebbles, a broken pencil, a spoon whose necessity she cannot explain, and a summer hat, even though it is cold outside. You take out half the things, she puts them back when you turn around, and in the end the suitcase is almost as heavy as the child herself. Your last evening passes almost like all the others — you have dinner, you bathe her, she insists on washing the rabbit too, because it is going as well and it would be improper for it to arrive dirty, and then you read the story a little longer than usual and stay beside her after she has fallen asleep.

In the morning you dress her slowly, button her coat, straighten her collar, tie her shoes and sit her on the usual stool by the window to brush her hair. For the first time in years she hardly moves. She watches you in the mirror and asks when you will come. You say soon, she wants to know exactly how long “soon” is, and you answer that she won’t even have time to miss you properly. This satisfies her, and a little later you are walking to the station hand in hand.

The platform is full of children, parents, suitcases, bundles and people repeating the same instructions several times, as if each new “take care” could stretch the time by one more minute. You tell your daughter to listen to her aunt, not to go out alone, to wear her scarf, to write and not to quarrel with her cousins, until she finally interrupts you and, with some impatience, reminds you that you have already said all of that. When the train arrives, you lift the child onto the step and for a moment her hand stays in yours — the same small hand you held so many times on the boulevard. Then you have to let go. From the window she waves, smiles and pulls a funny face, because she sees that you are crying, and you smile too as the train pulls away and the last carriage disappears.

When you get home, the apartment seems unusually big and quiet. You go into the children’s room and that is when you see the rabbit on the bed, pressed against the pillow. After all the arguments about the books, the pebbles, the spoon and the completely useless summer hat, your daughter has forgotten the one thing she has dragged everywhere for years. You pick it up and for a moment you even laugh, because you imagine her face when she discovers it is missing that evening. You decide to send it the very next day and place it on top of your own suitcase so you won’t forget.

The next day, however, brings the news that the railway line has been temporarily cut. You write a letter, then another, and after a few days you receive a short message that the child has arrived safely. Your sister writes that on the first evening she cried, but then fell asleep beside her cousin, has already found a cat in the yard and has obviously begun negotiations for its adoption. At the end there are a few crooked lines from the child herself, asking whether the rabbit is with you and when you will come. You reply at once that the rabbit is fine, that you are keeping it safe and that you will soon bring it yourself.

In the following days things in the city get worse. Some of the shops close, the trams run irregularly, explosions are heard again at night, and in the workshop there is hardly any talk of dresses anymore, because you are sewing sheets, bandages and clothes for the hospital. Several times you decide to set off for another station from which trains are still leaving, but each time there is a new restriction, a closed road or a warning to wait. Your small suitcase stays packed by the door, with the rabbit on top, because the promise to bring it yourself is gradually becoming a promise to yourself as well — that you will reach your child.

One morning the city is unusually quiet, and that very silence wakes you earlier. You make coffee, get dressed, put your documents, a little food and your daughter’s last letter in your bag, and decide that this time you will go, however hard the journey may be. The elderly neighbor meets you on the stairs and asks whether you really intend to reach the other station alone, and you tell her that first you will get to the end of the street and then decide what comes next. You are almost downstairs when you realize the rabbit has been left on the suitcase in the room.

At that very moment the shelling begins. The first explosion is far away, the second is closer, and the people in the building start going down to the cellar. The neighbor pulls you along with her, but you look up the stairs and see your daughter at the station, her small hand on the glass, and then the crooked letters in her note asking whether the rabbit is with you. You know it is only a piece of fabric with one shorter ear and a leg sewn back on countless times, but you also know that you made it with your own hands, that for six years it has slept beside your child and that you promised to bring it yourself. You go back up, take it from the suitcase and press it to you just as the next explosion shakes the building.

When you hear voices again, you are lying among dust, pieces of plaster and broken glass, and someone is trying to reach you through the wrecked room. The rabbit is still in your hand, and as you grip it, your thoughts are already far from this city. You see your daughter in your sister’s house, see how someone else will button her coat in the morning, how she will set off for school with her cousins, make new friends, grow up and one day really cross the street without your hand. You know your sister loves her, that the child is safe, and that when you put her on the train you did the hardest and the most right thing you could have done for her.

Only love does not calm down so easily with sensible arguments. You think about who will understand when your daughter is silent because she is hurt and when she is silent because she is afraid, who will remember that during thunderstorms she wants the door left slightly open, who will tell the story in the voices of all the characters and with that extra ending you invented together, and who will take her hand when she gets distracted and forgets to look out for the tram. And as the world around you slowly moves away, your thoughts stay with the child you let go of precisely in order to save her, and the question you take with you is simple and deeply human: “Who will take care of you?”

The trace in your life today

If you chose the child’s toy, you may recognize this trace in the way you love today. “Text me when you get there”, “Call me when you’re home”, “Did you take your medicine?”, “Are you sure this is a good idea?” can be the most ordinary words of care, but behind them may also live the old feeling that if you don’t check, don’t warn or aren’t close by, that is exactly when something will happen. The person in front of you may be perfectly capable of making decisions, living with their consequences and handling their own difficulties, while part of you still sees the small hand that once needed to be held when crossing the street.

This trace can appear in your relationship with a child, a partner, a parent, a friend or anyone else you love deeply. Another person’s independence can make you glad and anxious at the same time, because behind the wish to help creeps the fear that your love somehow protects them, and that if you let go, you leave them defenseless. Then you start anticipating dangers, reminding, checking, offering solutions before anyone has asked, and finding it hard to watch someone close to you make a choice you would never make yourself.

Yet the one you love may already have grown up. They may have learned their streets, know when to stop and when to go on, make a mistake and then find their own way out of it. Your care does not become smaller when you leave them room for this, just as love does not disappear when you stop guarding their every step. Perhaps the hardest continuation of this old story is discovering that staying beside someone and letting them walk on their own can be part of one and the same love.

If this image is yours, think of the person you find it hardest to let manage on their own, and finish two sentences without looking for a beautiful answer: “I’m afraid that if I don’t protect you…” and “I believe you can already…” Read them one after the other and see what lies between them. Perhaps that is exactly where the difference lies between the hand that grips out of fear of losing, and the hand that stays close but already trusts that the beloved person can take the next few steps alone.

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Image 5

The Open Door

The home you never returned to

Even before you open your eyes, you know where the wind is coming from. When it blows off the sea, the wooden shutters on the upper floor tap softly and the smell of salt comes into the room, and on hot days the crickets start at dawn and don’t fall silent until evening, as if they had taken personal responsibility for making sure nobody in town forgets it is summer. You live at the end of the nineteenth century in a small town in southern Europe, not far from the sea. The houses are of pale stone, the streets run down the hill, and everyone knows each other well enough to know who does what for a living, who married whom and why last Sunday two cousins stopped speaking to each other. By the following Sunday they have usually made up, but the town still manages to discuss the matter in detail.

Your house has been in the family for so long that nobody can say who lived in it first. A fig tree grows by the entrance, an old vine hangs over the table in the yard, and on the third step to the upper floor one stone wobbles. Your father has been fixing it for years, at least according to his own claims. Your mother has a different version and regularly reminds him that a person could build an entire house in the time it takes him to repair one step. The rest of you have simply learned to skip it. The door to the yard has its own quirk too — in summer the wood swells and you have to lift it slightly with your knee to close it. If you come home late, you can walk through the whole house in the dark and still know where to step, where the floor creaks and in which spot the cat has most likely decided to lie right in your path.

You grew up in this house with two brothers and a sister and never thought of it as anything special. It is simply the place where your day begins and where you come home in the evening. In the mornings your mother bakes bread and the smell reaches the upper floor before anyone has called you to breakfast. In the warm months you eat under the vine, and there is regularly at least one more person around the table than expected. The neighbor comes to return a tool and stays for coffee, a cousin drops by to say two words and half an hour later is still sitting with you, and the woman from the next yard talks with your mother over the low fence, because after forty years of acquaintance, walking around and knocking on the door would seem almost suspicious. When everyone talks at once, your father insists that in his own house a man should be able to hear his own thoughts, and your mother tells him that if he is so keen on hearing them, he can go and sit with the goats, because at least they know how to keep quiet while they eat.

You work with your father and your older brother in a small carpentry workshop near the square. You make doors, tables, chests, repair boats and take on almost anything that someone has managed to break and still thinks deserves a second life. In the evening you walk the same street home, and before you reach the gate you already know who is visiting by the voices in the yard. In your twenties you imagine your future quite clearly: you will marry, build on one more room, put a new table under the vine, and one day your children will also skip the third step while their grandfather goes on claiming he will fix it next week. When you think about life ten or twenty years ahead, the people around the table change, but the table stays the same.

Then the orders start to dwindle. One month is slow, the next even slower, and the debt on the house grows. First two men from the next street leave, then a cousin, and finally a letter arrives from an acquaintance working in a big industrial city far to the north. He writes that a factory and several workshops are looking for people and pay enough for a man to send money home to his family. Your younger brother wants to go at once. Your father declares that nobody is leaving home for some factory, and a few months later he himself sits down one evening with a pencil and paper and starts calculating how quickly you could pay off the debt if all of you worked.

Three years. That is what you decide. You will go for three years, earn enough, pay off the house and come back with money to start again. Three years doesn’t feel like leaving home, because in your minds you can already see the return. A cousin will look after the house, the neighbor will check the roof after storms, the furniture will stay, the dishes too, and your mother flatly refuses to take the big pot, because she will need it when you come back. Your father promises that then he will finally fix the third step, and your mother answers that if this repair requires the family to cross half a continent and come back again, at least she now understands why she has waited so many years.

In the last week the house is full of suitcases and people who have come to say goodbye. You take a few clothes, your tools and a family photograph, and you leave the rest, because in three years you will need it in exactly the same place. On the last morning you wake before everyone else and go out into the yard. The vine casts its shade over the table, the stones are still damp from the night, the kitchen is beginning to smell of bread, and somewhere behind the houses the first cart can be heard. You sit down for a moment and your eyes move over the fig tree, the bucket by the wall, the old broom behind the door and the piece of wood wedged under one leg of the table. For the first time you look at them so carefully, and it even makes you laugh that you have suddenly decided to memorize a broom, when in three years you will find it in the same place again.

When you leave, almost the whole street is outside. Someone brings bread for the road, someone gives you a bottle of wine, someone else explains exactly how you should travel, even though he has never left the town. Your mother cries, your sister too, and your father keeps saying there is no reason for such farewells, because in three years you will all be at the same table again. You are the last to step out, and you reach to close the heavy wooden door, but the cousin who will look after the house tells you to leave it, because in a moment he will go in to put away the remaining things. You follow your family, and at the bend you turn around for one last look. The door is open, behind it you can see part of the yard and the corner of the table under the vine, and you walk on toward the station, completely sure that in three years you will come back down this same street and pass through it again.

The new city greets you with factory chimneys, coal dust, noise and so many unfamiliar faces that in the first weeks it feels strange to go out into the street and have nobody know whose son you are. You find work in a big carpentry workshop, share a room with your brother and count the months by the money you send home. After the first year the debt has shrunk considerably and everyone talks about the remaining two. In the second year your father falls ill and part of the savings goes to his treatment. Your sister starts working, your brother gets a better position, you too begin earning more, and the life around you gradually fills with people who were strangers yesterday and today already know how you take your coffee.

The third year passes and nobody packs the suitcases. You decide to stay one more year so you can go home with more money, then one more, because the work is going well. Meanwhile your sister marries, you meet a woman you first talk with after work, then begin waiting for, and in time the two of you rent a home of your own. You write home, receive letters and keep saying you will come back, because you truly believe it. Only the date starts to shift.

News arrives from the old town. The cousin has repaired the roof, the woman from the house next door has died, the fisherman’s family has moved away, and for a while relatives have been living in your house so that it wouldn’t stand empty. You ask whether the vine is still there and whether you can still see the sea from the upper landing. The answer comes that the house is fine and almost everything is the same. That word — “almost” — stays with you, because for the first time you allow yourself to think that the place waiting for your return is also living through the years you are away.

Your life goes on too. You marry, children are born, you buy a home, and gradually it turns out that you have neighbors you have known for fifteen years, friends you celebrate with, and work where the young ones now come to ask you how things are done. One afternoon you hear your son say to a friend “come over to our place”, and you understand that for your children “home” is the place you have made with them. The stone house by the sea belongs to the stories you tell at dinner — about their grandfather, the vine, the neighbor over the fence and the third step, which is probably still waiting for your father to find the time to fix it.

This doesn’t make your new life any less yours. You love your wife, your children, your home and the people who have gathered around you over the years. You have holidays, hard times, family quarrels, weddings, births and those ordinary Sundays a person barely notices, until one day they realize that this is exactly what their life was made of. The stone house by the sea stays somewhere in you in a different way. When you catch the smell of freshly baked bread, for a moment you see your mother’s kitchen. When someone mentions your part of the world, you immediately want to know what it looks like now. When people come back from there, you ask about the weather, the streets and the sea, as if all of it could tell you whether home still remembers you.

Many years pass before you receive a photograph of the house. You look at it for a long time. The fig tree has grown enormous, the stone wall looks lower, there are different curtains in the windows, and in front of the entrance there are people you have never seen. Suddenly you understand how strangely you have kept this place — in your memories your mother is still taking out the bread, your father is still coming in through the yard with his tools, your sister is still young, and all of you will sit down at the table the moment you get back. The real house has gone on without you. Other people have opened the door, children have run up the stairs, the trees have grown, some faces from the street have disappeared and new ones have come.

That is when you decide for the first time that you must go soon. You want to take your wife, then the children, years later the grandchildren. There is always a suitable “after this” — after work, after winter, after the family celebration, after someone recovers, after travel gets easier. You don’t notice when “I’ll go back” turns into “I should have gone back”, because there is no single big moment between the two. There are many small days when you simply had other things to do.

When you are old, one of your granddaughters finds the photograph in a box of family pictures. She sits beside you and starts asking who is in it, where the house is and why everyone in old photographs looks as if the photographer had just given them bad news. You tell her about the yard, the vine and the sea between the roofs, about your mother’s bread, about your father and his endless repair of the third step. You tell her how in summer the door would stick and you had to lift it slightly with your knee. She laughs and asks how it is possible to remember exactly that after so many years, and you laugh too, because you have forgotten important dates, people’s names and entire conversations, yet you still know how an old wooden door sounds when it opens in the morning.

Your granddaughter looks at the photograph a little longer and finally asks why you never went back. The question is so simple that at first you start looking for a big answer — the work, the money, the family, the distance, all those sensible reasons that were real over the years. Then you understand that the truest answer is much shorter, and you tell her: “I always thought there was time.”

This is your last day. In the afternoon you get tired and the photograph stays on the blanket beside your hand. From the kitchen comes the smell of coffee, in the next room the family is talking, one of the children is laughing, and you close your eyes just for a moment. In your memory, though, you are already walking down another street. The stones under your feet are warm from the sun, the air smells of the sea, and from the end of the lane you see the pale wall of the house. You turn into the yard, climb the steps, and your foot skips the third one on its own, as if no decades had passed between that day and this. From the kitchen comes the smell of bread, voices can be heard under the vine, and the old wooden door is open exactly as you left it the morning you set off for three years.

You walk toward it and everything is familiar. There is no need to remember where to step or how the gate opens, because your body knows. For a moment you are again the man coming home in the evening from the workshop, who can hear his family in the yard from the street. The life you built far from this place was real and full of people you love, and this house remained the first place where you never asked yourself whether you belonged. You left it thinking the separation would last three years, and so you never said goodbye to it.

As the voices of your family around you slowly fade, the door in your memory stays open, and this time you reach it. Your last thought is simple: “I want to go home.”

The trace in your life today

If you chose the open door, you may know that hard-to-explain feeling that somewhere there is a place where it would be easier to be yourself. You may have a lovely home and people you love, and still your gaze keeps coming to rest on certain cities, houses, seashores or mountains. You may travel a great deal or be someone who rarely leaves your own town, but some country, language, climate or kind of house has drawn you for years for no particular reason. When you come across such a place, your interest doesn’t end with a photo and a stroll. You start imagining what an ordinary morning there would look like, where you would buy bread, what light would come through the window and what it would be like to have a key to that door.

Or perhaps you have already lived through that strange moment when you arrive somewhere for the first time and, in place of delight, you feel recognition. The street feels close, the air pleases you in a way you can hardly explain, and you want to stay long enough to see the place after the tourists leave and ordinary life begins. Then a word may appear in your head that has nothing to do with how beautiful it is: “finally”.

If this image is yours, think of the places your gaze has returned to over the years. Imagine one of them early in the morning, when there is nothing to sightsee and the day is only beginning. Where would you drink your coffee, what would you hear through the window, what air would come into the room, and would you want to come back to the same address in the evening? Then ask yourself: “What exactly do I recognize in this place, and what of it is missing from my life now?” The answer may be the sea, a yard, light, closeness with people, more space or a completely different rhythm. And if one day you find yourself in a place where your first thought is “finally”, it may be worth not hurrying to leave.

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Image 6

The Key

The thing that remained yours

The key is heavy, made of iron and big enough to feel through the fabric of your coat, yet for years you have hardly looked at it. Your fingers find it on their own every morning while you are still walking down the street, and when you reach the shop, you slide it into the lock, turn it twice and push the door with your shoulder, because the wood has warped and on damp days it likes to test your patience. Then you raise the shutters, carry the little sign out in front of the entrance, light the lamp at the back and check what you left in the press the evening before. You live in the middle of the nineteenth century in a large European city, in a quarter of craftsmen, small traders and people who spend enough time in front of their shops to know who opened early, who was late and who yesterday had a customer leave so angry that by evening the whole street had heard his version.

Your place is a small bookbinding workshop with a little shop at the front. On the shelves there are books, notebooks, paper, ink and a few expensive volumes that have been there so long you now treat them almost as part of the furniture. At the back is the workbench with the thread, the knives, the leather, the glue and the press, and by the window there is a chair for customers who come in “just for a minute” and half an hour later are still telling you what happened to their cousin. Above the entrance hangs a sign with your name and the words “Bookbinder and Bookseller”. You painted it yourself many years ago, and every spring you touch up the letters, because the rain stubbornly tries to wash your profession off the front of the building. For several years you have been promising to order a new sign, and then some more important expense comes along and the old one gets another season of life.

When you started, the shop looked quite different. You had one workbench, an old press, two shelves and a loan that seemed so large that in the first months you felt it almost as another person in the room. You learned the craft from an old bookbinder with a superb eye for mistakes and almost no talent for pointing them out kindly. From him you learned how to restore a book that is falling apart, how to work with leather, how the pages are gathered and why the phrase “that’ll do” usually means that in a moment you will be doing everything over again. When you finally saved enough money to rent a place of your own, on the first day you sat behind the empty counter listening to the footsteps in the street, convinced that every next person would come in. Almost nobody did.

The first real order was brought by an old teacher. His book had fallen apart into several pieces, and he laid it in front of you with the kind of trust that is wonderful when a person knows what they are doing, and a little frightening when they are still hoping to figure it out in time. You worked on it for two days, returned it with a new spine and sound pages, and a week later the teacher brought a friend. Then came another person, and another. Year after year the shelves began to fill, the old press gained company, and you stopped counting how many times a day the little bell above the door rang.

Now you have people who have been coming to you for years. The teacher still claims he has no money at all, after which he almost always leaves with a book under his arm. A lawyer from the next street brings documents to be bound and always wants them by the next morning, because in his view urgency is the natural state of all his papers. A widow buys notebooks for her son, looks through at least ten and in the end chooses the same ones as last time. Students come for cheap paper, clerks for ink, families bring old Bibles, albums and diaries that have outlived their owners by many years. You know your regular customers by their footsteps, by their knock and even by the way they set a book down on the counter.

In the evening you close the shutters and sit down to do the accounts. You pay the rent, the paper, the leather, the ink and the other materials, set aside what you owe on the loan, and the remainder gradually begins to look like real profit. You buy a better press, add cupboards, widen the selection of books and one day hire a young assistant. At first he sweeps, carries orders and asks so many questions that several times you wonder whether it wouldn’t be quicker to do everything yourself. Then you notice that his hands are skillful. You start showing him the craft, first with the easy orders, then with the more difficult ones. He hurries, you make him start over, he grumbles, you pretend not to hear, and so the years go by.

The boy grows up in the workshop and gradually begins doing almost everything you do. Customers still call him “the boy”, although he now has a beard and is old enough to be indignant about it. When you tell him he has left the knife in the wrong place, he reminds you that the knife has been in the same place for three days and the world still exists. You explain that the world obviously has more patience than you. Gradually you begin trusting him with more expensive books and less and less often find a reason to correct his work, though out of professional pride you are in no hurry to tell him so.

The workshop is your own creation, and you feel it most strongly in the morning, when you raise the shutters and the street is not yet fully awake. You remember the empty shelves, the first loan, the first order and the evenings when you counted the coins twice, hoping there would be more on the second count. Now your name is known in the quarter. If someone has an old book they want to save, they are sent to you. If a student is looking for a notebook, if the lawyer is late with his documents again, or if someone wants a book that is hard to find, they come to your street. There is no monument, no great wealth and nobody writes about you in the newspaper, but when you unlock the door in the morning, you know why you have spent so many years behind this bench.

For some time you have been thinking about expanding. The space next door is becoming free, and you see a chance to finally create the bookshop you have dreamed of for years. You want a big window onto the street, more shelves, a long table for new books and a separate place for the workshop, where the glue and the leather won’t share the air with the customers. In the evenings you sketch plans on paper, measure the walls and calculate how much it will all cost. Your assistant watches you move the same cupboard on the drawing for the third time and says that if you go on like this, you will soon have to buy the next street too. You answer that for now you will be happy if you can pay for one wall.

Just then he receives a letter from his brother in another city. A big printing house is looking for someone with his skills and is offering wages you can hardly match. Your assistant brings you the letter and circles around the subject all afternoon, until finally he admits that he wants to go, but feels as if he were abandoning you in the middle of the expansion. You would also prefer him to stay. You have grown used to working together, and somewhere in your mind you had begun to see him, years from now, opening up in the morning in your place. Only, you have never talked about it. You always thought that first you would finish the expansion, settle the accounts, buy the new press, and then the two of you would sit down like two grown men and discuss the future.

You tell him to take the job. You remember all too well what it is like to be young, to work at someone else’s bench and wait for a chance to take the next step. He leaves at the beginning of autumn, and on his last day the two of you close the shop together. He leaves you the spare key he has carried these past years and jokes that at last you will be able to know where all the knives are again. You tell him to write and not to imagine that the big printing house will put up with his habit of leaving tools wherever they happen to land. Then you lock up and put both keys in your pocket.

The first weeks after he leaves are harder than you expected. You hire a boy for the small jobs, but he doesn’t know the craft yet. In the morning you open earlier, in the evening you stay later, and between orders you continue the renovation of the room next door. You have already ordered a new window and shelves, and the old sign above the entrance has been taken down to be replaced by a bigger one. You lean it against the wall at the back, and every time you pass it you see the faded letters of your name. You decide to keep it. After so many years together it would be a little rude to throw it out just because you have ordered a prettier one.

You also think about someone who might one day take over the business. You have nephews, but one is studying medicine, another wants to move away, and the third shows interest in books mainly when money has been left between the pages. The young boy in the workshop can learn, but it will take years. Your assistant may come back someday, but he already has his own path. You tell yourself there is no reason to hurry. You are in your fifties, you work every day, you have plans for next year and a whole list of things that must be ready by spring. You will think about the future once the renovation is finished.

Your last day begins like almost any other. You unlock early, raise the shutters and stand on the pavement for a moment to look at the new window that was put in the day before. You like it. Inside there is still dust from the renovation, two shelves are waiting to be fixed to the wall, and in the middle of the room there is a crate of books that arrived late last night. You take off your coat, slip the key into your waistcoat pocket and start work.

First comes the paper supplier, and the two of you spend ten minutes arguing about the price, an argument you have already had at least three times. He claims everything has gone up, you ask whether the air around the paper is now also sold separately, and in the end you settle somewhere in the middle. Then the old teacher arrives with a book under his arm and announces from the doorway that this month he has no money at all. By the time he leaves, he has left a book for repair and bought another. After him comes the lawyer with yet another urgent order, a woman buys two notebooks for her children, a student asks whether you can find him a particular textbook, and the boy mixes up two orders and receives his first real lesson in why the names on the parcels are not a decorative element.

Around noon you sit for a while on the chair by the window and look at the shop. The sun falls through the new window exactly as you imagined it would. You think about where you will put the table for new books, decide that one of the shelves should go a little to the left and make a note to order more lamps. On the desk lies a letter from your former assistant. He writes that the work at the printing house is good, that the city is enormous and that for the first time in his life nobody asks him where he left the knives. You smile and decide to answer him that evening.

In the afternoon you work on an old family book whose leather binding has almost fallen apart. These are the orders you love most, because they require time and patience. The boy is beside you, watching how you prepare the spine. You explain why he mustn’t rush, how to feel the tension of the thread and when the glue is dry enough. For the first time you notice that he is really listening, without just waiting for you to give him the next task. You think that perhaps he will make a good craftsman after all, provided he doesn’t decide in six months that he would rather sell shoes.

Toward the end of the day the customers thin out. The boy goes home, and you stay a little longer to clear the workbench. You write down two orders for next week, leave a note for the supplier, carry a few books over to the new shelf and open your assistant’s letter once more. You begin your reply, but after a few lines you glance at the clock and decide you will finish it tomorrow. Before leaving, you walk through the new room, measure the empty wall with your eyes and for a moment imagine how everything will look in a month. One more table, two more shelves, the new sign above the entrance and perhaps someone to take on more of the work, so you won’t spend every evening in the shop until late.

You close the shutters, put out the lamps and check the press. Then you step out into the street, lift the door with your shoulder and lock it twice. The key goes into your pocket the same way it has every evening for the past decades. On the way home you buy bread and stop by your sister’s, because she promised you a jar of jam. She insists you stay for dinner, and you decline, explaining that you are tired and have to open early tomorrow. You talk for a few more minutes at her door and she tells you again that you work too much. You answer that once the renovation is finished, you will slow down. She laughs, because she has heard the same promise before.

You never reach home.

A few streets from the shop you suddenly feel ill. The people nearby try to help and send someone for a doctor, but everything happens too fast. In your pocket they find a purse, a few notes, a pencil and the heavy iron key. Your sister comes later and recognizes it at once. She has held it many times, when you asked her to fetch something from the shop, but she never thought about what it means without the man who unlocks the door with it every morning.

As your life fades, your thoughts go back to the workshop. You see the family book on the bench, the letter you left unfinished, the crate of new books and the empty wall where tomorrow you were going to decide where the last shelf would go. You remember the boy who is only beginning to learn the craft, the assistant who is already building his own life far from the city, and all the conversations about the future that you left for after the renovation. And then you understand how many things you were preparing for a tomorrow that all day had seemed completely certain.

The hardest thought is about the place itself. You started with an old press and two empty shelves and reached a shop people know by your name. You know how the accounts are kept, who can be trusted, which supplier will lower the price after ten minutes of arguing and which customer will pay after three reminders. You know the craft you gathered into your hands over a whole lifetime, and the person you trained well enough to carry it on has already gone his own way. The young boy is only starting. In the last minutes you feel how much you have built and how little time you spent thinking about how it will go on when one day you are no longer there. That day has simply come much earlier than you expected, and the thought that stays with you is: “I’m leaving something unfinished.”

The next morning the old teacher arrives shortly after nine with the book he promised to bring. The door is locked. After him comes the lawyer, who looks at his watch, because for the first time the man he always hurries is making him wait. The supplier leaves his cart on the other side of the street and asks the neighbors whether you are ill. Little by little people gather in front of the shop, until someone brings the news. Behind the closed shutters are the new window, the old tools, the books for next week, the unfinished binding and the letter you meant to finish that evening. Above it all there is a place for the new sign, which hasn’t arrived yet, and the key to the door has stayed with the man who all his life believed that tomorrow morning he would come again to unlock it.

The trace in your life today

If you chose the key, you may know that inner restlessness that appears when for too long you put your strength only into other people’s plans. You may like your work, be good at it and receive recognition, and still in the evenings return to an idea that has been waiting for its time for years. For one person it is a small business, for another a book, a studio, a garden, a house, a project, a practice of their own or something that doesn’t have a name yet. What they share is the wish for part of your work to remain connected with you, and one day to look at something real and say to yourself: “I made this.”

This trace can also be recognized in the way you treat what you have created. When something is yours, you find it hard to put it in other hands. You check, correct, go back to the details and often tell yourself you will explain it to others later, because right now it is quicker to do it yourself. That way you can build a great deal, but gradually it turns out that you are the one who has all the keys — literally or figuratively — and without you nobody fully knows how the thing you have created works. Then the wish to leave a mark meets another important question: are you ready one day to pass on what you know, so that your work can live on beyond your own hands?

If this image is yours, set the big plans aside for a moment and imagine something much simpler: tomorrow you have a whole free day, nobody expects anything from you, there is no task of someone else’s you have to finish, and you can work only on what you choose yourself. What will you start with in the morning? Then ask yourself one more question: “What am I waiting for before I begin, and why do I believe I will have more time later?” Perhaps the answer will hint at what you would really like to remain after you one day, and which door is worth unlocking while the key is still in your hand.

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Image 7

The Suitcase

The road you never took

The suitcase is at your feet, the ticket is in your coat pocket, and the big clock above the platform shows eighteen minutes until departure. You check the ticket once more, although you know perfectly well what it says. For two months you have known the train number, the time, the station where you change and the name of the city you are traveling to, but now, with the locomotive in front of you and steam pouring out of it, the whole thing suddenly seems far more serious than the letters, the maps and the conversations at home. Around you porters load luggage, families embrace, a newspaper seller shouts the headlines, some child is crying, because clearly it too has an opinion about traveling, and your sister is beside the suitcase asking for the third time whether you have put your documents somewhere safe.

You are twenty-seven, and your life so far can be described by a few familiar streets. You live with your mother and your younger sister in a large provincial town at the beginning of the twentieth century and work in a merchant’s office, where the days pass among invoices, accounts, letters and a boss who believes that every minute an employee spends looking out of the window is a personal financial loss to the firm. In the evening you walk home the same way, buy bread from the same bakery, have Sunday lunch with relatives, and if nothing changes, you can imagine fairly accurately where you will be in ten years. You will probably have a bigger desk, a slightly higher salary and the same boss, who by then will be convinced that looking out of the window is the cause of the decline of all commerce.

A year ago a friend of yours left for a big city across the border. His first letters are full of complaints about the tiny room, the strange food, the landlady and the coffee, which in his opinion is an insult to the coffee bean. Then he starts writing about other things — the wide streets, the theaters, the bookshops, the people from different countries and the trading house where he has found work. The owner is looking for someone who can keep accounts and knows languages, and your friend has mentioned you. A few weeks later a formal offer arrives with a decent salary and a promise that the job is yours if you arrive by the beginning of autumn.

At first you leave the letter in a drawer. A few days later you read it again, then you start checking the price of tickets, and a little later you buy a phrasebook and in the evenings learn words of the foreign language. You like the feeling that somewhere there is a life that doesn’t have any habits yet. You imagine a room where you have never slept, a street you have never walked, people who know nothing about your family and can’t tell you what you did when you were twelve. The thought that you could arrive somewhere and decide for yourself who you will be draws you more and more.

When you announce your decision at home, your mother first asks where exactly you will live, then who this employer is, then what you will eat, and finally gets to the most important question — whether you have enough warm socks. Your sister takes your departure far more enthusiastically and immediately orders postcards, letters and a detailed description of the theater your friend wrote about. For a few days your mother walks around the house with an expression that makes it clear foreign countries were invented mainly to worry mothers, but gradually she starts to help you. She mends your coat, folds your shirts and on the evening before the journey manages to cram so much food into the suitcase that you have to take some of it out to leave room for your own things.

At the office you hand in your notice. Your boss declares that in six months you will be back begging to be rehired. You reply that if that happens, he will have the pleasure of saying “I told you so”, which visibly comforts him. You buy a sturdy leather suitcase, two new shirts and a coat that costs more than you planned, but you decide that a man doesn’t start a new life every week, after all. Your sister gives you a small notebook and insists that you write down what you see on the way, because one day she will want to read all of it.

On the last morning you have breakfast in the dark. Your mother got up before everyone and busies herself with the food so she won’t have to talk much. When you leave, she hugs you tightly, straightens your collar and tells you to write as soon as you arrive. Your sister walks with you to the station. On the way she talks almost nonstop, and you feel the ticket in your pocket with every step. For the first time the plan has an exact hour. At twenty past eleven the train will pull out, and everything that until now has been the future will begin.

Now the clock shows eighteen minutes left. Your sister buys a newspaper for the journey, although you already have a book, and tells you to keep the ticket, because in years to come you will find it interesting to look at. Ten minutes are left when you notice a boy from your street running toward you. He can hardly catch his breath, and at first his words come out in gasps. Your mother collapsed shortly after you left, the neighbor called a doctor, and they sent the boy to find you before the train leaves.

Your sister turns pale and grabs your hand. The conductor is already calling passengers to board, the people around you are gathering the last suitcases, and somewhere ahead a carriage door slams shut. You have a job, a room and a person waiting for you in another city. A few streets from the station your mother is lying at home, and nobody yet knows what is wrong with her. Your sister says she will go back alone and that you must leave, but you see the fear in her face. You pick up the suitcase and walk toward the exit with her.

When you reach the stairs, the locomotive whistles. You turn around and see the train slowly starting to move. For a few more seconds you could still run back, although you already know you won’t. You watch the windows go by one after another, and for a moment you see the empty seat in the carriage that was supposed to be yours. Then the last carriage moves away, the rails are left empty, and you head home with the suitcase in your hand and the ticket in your pocket.

The doctor is still with your mother when you get home. She has regained consciousness, but her condition is serious. She spends the next weeks almost entirely in bed, and when she begins to get up, one of her arms stays weak and walking is difficult. Your sister is young and earns little, and the family now needs your income. You write to your friend and explain what has happened. He answers at once that he will speak with the employer and try to keep the position for you. A month later a second letter arrives. They can wait a few more weeks.

Your mother learns about the letter and insists that you go. She says she will manage, that your sister is with her and that one missed train shouldn’t decide your whole life. You promise her you will go as soon as she is a little more independent. Meanwhile your old boss hears what has happened and offers to take you back at the office. You accept, because money is needed, and tell yourself it will be for a few months. After that your mother will be better, you will buy a new ticket, and the story will simply continue from where it stopped.

Only life rarely holds a place on the page while a person finishes with his other tasks. Your mother gradually recovers enough to move around the house, but she needs help now. Your sister starts working more, and at the office you are given a higher position and a salary that lets the family live decently. When a new letter arrives from your friend a few months later, the job has already been filled. He promises to look for another opportunity. You start saving again and keep studying the language in the evenings, but less often now. There is always a bill to pay, medicine to buy, work to finish or simply tiredness after a long day.

A year later your friend writes about another job. The salary is lower and the conditions less certain. You look at your mother, who can now walk to the yard on her own, at your sister, who will soon be getting married, and for the first time the decision no longer looks as clear as it did on that platform. You tell yourself you will wait a little longer and a better opportunity will come along. The letter goes into the drawer with the old ticket, and the phrasebook gradually ends up under other books.

Years pass and your life fills with things that were never part of your plans at twenty-seven. You meet a woman with whom you first argue over a miscalculated bill, and a few years later you argue about who was supposed to buy bread. You marry, children are born, you move to a bigger home and gradually become the person at the office whom the young ones come to ask how difficult cases are handled. Your mother lives long enough to hold your first child, and your sister starts a family of her own. There are evenings with friends, summer trips, family celebrations, worries, laughter and those small everyday arguments that seem tedious at the time and years later turn out to be among the things a person would most like to hear again.

Sometimes the name of that city appears in the newspaper or a customer mentions having been there. Then for a few minutes you imagine the street where you were supposed to live, the job you were supposed to start and the language you would probably be speaking by now without translating the words in your head. You wonder what people you would know and whether you would have stayed there for life. You never manage to decide whether that other life would have been better. Maybe after a year you would have come back disappointed. Maybe you would have built a career. Maybe you would have met someone else and had other children. That is exactly what makes the question so stubborn — there is nothing to compare your life with, because the other one never began.

The old suitcase gradually stops traveling. You buy a lighter, more practical one, and the leather one goes up on top of the wardrobe, where it starts collecting dust and family things nobody knows where else to put. The ticket stays in its small inside pocket together with your sister’s notebook. On the first page you wrote the date of the journey and the name of the city. The rest of the pages are blank.

When, years later, one of your grandsons gets the chance to study abroad, the family begins a long conversation about the money, the distance, the lodgings and every possible misfortune that can befall a young person the moment he crosses the border. You listen for a while and see how much it all resembles the evenings before your own journey. In the end your grandson turns to you and asks what you would do in his place. You tell him that if he wants to go, he should try, and if he doesn’t like it, trains run in the other direction too. Your daughter looks at you as if you had just betrayed the family council, and you only smile. At your age you already know how convincing fear can sound when it dresses itself up in sensible arguments.

In your last years you rarely think about that ticket. You have enough real memories to spend your time among them — the children’s first steps, your sister’s wedding, the summers with the family, your wife, who always claims you keep documents in better order than your own belongings. Your life has been full, and when you look back, you see people without whom you cannot imagine yourself. The other road has remained like an old street you never walked down, though you know it existed somewhere.

On your last day one of your granddaughters is helping to clear out a few cupboards and takes down the old leather suitcase. She opens it on the bed and starts taking out forgotten scarves, photographs and documents, until the small notebook falls out of the inside pocket. Between its pages is the yellowed ticket. She looks at it, reads the name of the city and asks when you went there. You look at the ticket and for a moment you are twenty-seven again, in a coat that cost more than it should have, with a suitcase at your feet and eighteen minutes ahead of you.

You tell her you never got there, and she immediately wants to know why you kept the ticket for so many years. You smile, because you don’t really have an answer. Probably at first you kept it because you meant to use the story as the beginning of the next journey, then because it stayed in the suitcase, and after that it had simply become part of your life, like an old photograph. Your granddaughter opens the notebook and sees the date, the name of the city and all the blank pages after them. She asks what you were going to write. You answer that you meant to write down your new life.

After she leaves the room, you set the notebook beside you and hold the ticket in your hand. You remember your mother on the doorstep, your sister at the station, the boy running along the platform, the whistle of the locomotive and that brief moment when you could still have turned around and climbed aboard. You know what came after — the family you created, the children, the grandchildren, the work, the friends and all the years that became your life. You have no wish to trade them for the unknown. It is just that for the first time in a long while you feel how close you once came to a completely different version of yourself.

You close your eyes and the station returns with incredible clarity. You hear the voices, the footsteps, the carriage doors and the locomotive. You see the suitcase at your feet and the clock above the platform. In those eighteen minutes both lives were still possible. One you lived to the end, and in it are people you love. The other left with the train and remained forever without memories, without faces and without an answer. It is toward that one that the last question passing through your mind returns: “If I had gone…”

The trace in your life today

If you chose the suitcase, then in your present life too the decisions you didn’t make may stay with you for a long time. You may remember a job you wanted to apply for, a move you kept postponing, a person you could have stepped toward, a course, a journey or an idea for which there always needed to be a little more time. Your life may be good and full, and still some missed opportunity keeps appearing in your thoughts with the question of what kind of person you would have been if you had chosen the other road back then. This curiosity doesn’t cancel the value of what you have. It simply reminds you how many possible lives can fit into one decision.

Perhaps that is why movement draws you so strongly. A new city, another country, a change of job, a project of your own or a change in your way of life can awaken both desire and anxiety in you at the same time. When the opportunity is real, you begin to see all the reasons to stay and all the reasons to go, and the hardest part is working out which of them belong to reality and which have come from fear. Sometimes staying is the choice that protects something important to you, and at other times the waiting gradually turns into a decision you have never spoken aloud.

If this image is yours, think of one decision you are postponing now and ask yourself: “Am I still waiting for the right moment, or have I already chosen to stay without admitting it to myself?” Then imagine yourself ten years from now and see which question you would rather not be carrying with you by then. The answer won’t necessarily tell you to pack the suitcase. It may help you understand why it is still by the door, and whether the road you are waiting for is still yours.

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Image 8

The Unfinished Work

The gift your life was too short for

By day you repair furniture. Chairs with wobbly legs, tables that have survived dozens of family dinners, cupboards with doors that refuse to close, and old chests whose owners are convinced that if they have lasted fifty years, they can last at least as many more. The workshop is small, it smells of wood, linseed oil and dust, and above the bench hang your father’s tools. You learned the trade from him and took over the work after his death. By the end of the nineteenth century, people in the little town know that if a piece of furniture is worth saving, they should bring it to you, and if it isn’t, they will bring it anyway and spend half an hour trying to convince you otherwise.

You are good at your work and you love it. Your hands know wood, tell one kind from another by its weight and smell, and often understand what is wrong with it before you have even taken out your tools. You can make a new leg for a table so that the owner can’t tell which one was replaced, restore broken carving and bring back to life a cupboard that someone else has already suggested turning into firewood. With this work you provide for your wife and your two children. You have a small house behind the workshop, a yard with a vine and a table where you eat dinner in summer. Your wife keeps the accounts, because very early on she realized that your “he’ll pay me next week” may be a lovely human hope but is a rather poor way to run a household.

After dinner the children tell you what they did during the day, your wife clears the dishes, and you usually announce that you are tired and will go to bed early tonight. Nobody in the family takes this information very seriously anymore. When the house goes quiet, you go back to the workshop, light the lamp, and then begins that part of the day no customer pays you for. You take out the small chisels, choose a piece of wood and start carving.

You have done it since you were a boy. Your father was the first to notice that, in place of throwing away the offcuts from the boards, you collected them and carved leaves, birds, faces and small human figures into them. He liked your work, though he always insisted on pointing out that before a person takes up beautiful things, it is good to learn to make a chair a customer can sit on without risking his life. You learned both. Only, during the day there are orders, deadlines and a family that needs to eat, so the things you invent yourself are left for the hours after everything else.

Your wife often wakes in the night and sees the light from the workshop. In the first years she came to tell you what time it was. Later she understood that you know perfectly well what time it is and that this information has no effect whatsoever on your behavior. Sometimes one of the children wakes for a glass of water and finds you bent over the wood. At breakfast you have shavings on your sleeve or dust in your hair, and your wife looks at you and asks whether by any chance you went to bed exactly five minutes before everyone else got up. You promise that tonight you will be sensible. She has been married to you long enough not to spoil her morning with unnecessary expectations.

Among the wood you keep for yourself there is a wide walnut board. You bought it from a man clearing out an old house, and the moment you saw it you knew you wanted to make something special from it. For four years you move it from one place to another and refuse to use it for any order. One day your wife asks how much longer you are going to keep it, and you answer that you don’t yet know what is inside it. She looks the board over and says that whatever it is, it is clearly in no hurry to come out.

The idea comes one winter evening. You begin with a tree — a big trunk, roots and branches spreading across the whole board. At first you have no exact plan. You carve one branch, then another, add a bird, the window of a small house and a human figure beneath the tree. Some time later a girl with braids appears, sitting on one of the branches. Your daughter sees it and immediately declares that it is her. You answer that it doesn’t look like her at all, and she points to the braids, the dress and the scraped knee and wants to know how much more evidence you need. A few days later you add a small boy holding a stick like a sword. Your son asks no questions and simply accepts that you have finally started working on the important subjects.

The panel grows slowly, and with it your whole life begins to enter it. A man appears bent over a workbench, who looks suspiciously like your father. By a window you carve a woman, and when your wife sees her, she remarks that the dress is the same as hers. You try to explain that it is a coincidence, and she kindly agrees to leave the artist his dignity. You add the dog from the next yard, because it spends enough time with you to deserve a place in the family history, a small table under the tree, a basket of apples and more faces that begin as strangers and gradually take on the features of people you have seen in your life.

You work on the panel when you can. There are weeks when you hardly touch it, because someone has ordered a whole set of furniture, a child has fallen ill or the roof has decided that this particular winter is the right time to start letting in water. Then a quiet evening comes, everyone falls asleep and you sit down again in front of the walnut board. You don’t need time to remember where you stopped. Your hand knows.

The children grow and more and more often stand beside you while you work. Your son wants to try the chisel, and his first leaves look more like something nature would rather not admit to, but gradually they get better. Your daughter draws and sometimes leaves sketches on your bench to hear what you think. One day she asks why you make so many things for other people and leave your own panel for last. You answer that customers have deadlines and the panel doesn’t. She accepts the explanation, but years later you will remember exactly this conversation.

Your wife sees the difference too. After a hard day you can walk into the workshop tired and irritated by a customer who has changed his order three times, and two hours later come out with wood shavings on your shirt and a wish to tell her how you solved the face of one of the figures. She starts asking why you don’t give more time to your carving. You answer that the family can’t eat wooden birds for dinner, and she reminds you that nobody has suggested replacing bread with them. In her view you can go on repairing furniture and still set aside a few hours for the work you return to every evening of your own accord.

You begin showing some of your smaller carvings. A customer sees a box you made for your wife and orders a similar one. Another wants a mirror frame, then comes an order for a decorative door, and one day a man comes in specially because of a sign he saw outside someone else’s house. You like that people want things that first appeared in your head. You begin to think you could gradually give more time to them. When the children are a little older, you will have more time. When you pay off the loan, you will have more time. When you fix the roof, when you train an assistant, when the busy winter is over — there is always something after which the day will supposedly get longer.

The children really do grow up. The loan is paid off. The roof is fixed. In the workshop there is now a young man who can handle a large part of the repairs on his own. One day your wife reminds you that for at least ten years you have been talking about the time when you will have more time, and asks whether you intend to wait for it sitting down or will actually do something about it. This time you hear her. You start closing the workshop a little earlier two days a week and keep those hours for your own work. At first you feel a strange guilt, as if you were doing something forbidden in broad daylight, but the feeling passes quite quickly.

The panel advances more in one year than in the previous three. The crown of the tree is finished, there are dozens of faces now, small scenes surround the roots, and only the bottom right corner is still waiting. There you have sketched a road leading out beyond the frame and a man with a small bag over his shoulder. One of his hands is finished, the other is still only a pencil line. Beside him there is to be a dog, and behind him you have marked a place for a young tree. On the next table there are already other sketches — four separate panels for the seasons, a box for your daughter and several ideas you have jotted down on whatever scrap of paper came to hand.

Just then you start getting more tired. At first you pay little attention. All your life you have worked hard and you have never been a man who enjoys spending the afternoon in bed. Then comes the cough, your strength fades and the doctor insists that you rest. In the months that follow, your assistant takes over the work and you go down to the workshop less and less often. On good days you work a little on the panel. On bad days you look at it from the doorway and tell yourself that in a few days you will go on.

One spring morning you wake weaker than usual, but it is warm outside and the window is open. From the workshop come the familiar sounds — the little bell above the door, your assistant’s footsteps, a tool striking wood, a customer’s voice. Around noon you tell your wife you want to go down for a while. She looks at you and understands that she can spend the next half hour arguing or simply help you get up, so she chooses the shorter option.

In the workshop everything is as you know it and at the same time looks a little different, because for the first time in many years you are the person who just sits and watches. There are shavings on the floor, a chair waits for repair on one of the tables, the tools are by the window, and on the wall is the panel. The afternoon light falls on the wood, and for a moment you see everything at once — your father at the workbench, your wife by the window, your daughter with her braids, your son with his stick, the neighbors’ dog, the birds, the house and all the small scenes you have added over the years. Your daughter comes a little later, stands beside you and again points to the girl on the branch. She asks whether you will finally admit that it is her. You say the resemblance is pure coincidence, and she laughs, because the two of you have been having this conversation for twenty years.

Your gaze drops to the bottom corner, where the traveler still has only one finished hand. Your assistant notices where you are looking and asks whether you would like him to finish the rest. You know his hands and you know he is now a good enough craftsman to make it beautiful. You tell him to leave it as it is. When he asks why, you answer simply: “Because you don’t know what I have in mind.” He nods and puts the chisel away without arguing.

Beside the panel are the pieces of wood set out for the next works. In the drawer are the sketches for the seasons, and on the table waits the unfinished box for your daughter. You look at them and for a moment you wish you had one more year, then another, and after that you would probably ask for five more, because in the meantime new things would occur to you. You understand that if a person loves to create, they hardly ever reach a day when they sit back satisfied and announce that they have already made everything that interested them. There is always one more piece of wood, one more idea and one more thing you want to see take shape as it passes through your own hands.

In the evening you are at home with your wife and the children. You talk about ordinary things, your daughter tells you about her children, your son mentions a job he has to do the next day, and your wife glances at you now and then to see whether you are too tired. Through the open window comes the smell of spring and the faint scent of wood from the workshop. You think about the panel and about the man who will stay forever with one hand, and the thought even makes you smile a little. Someone years from now will probably wonder how you meant to finish him, and the answer will remain yours alone.

When you close your eyes, all the other things you made pass before you — the first clumsy leaves on the offcuts, the boxes, the frames, the birds, the faces, the children’s drawings on your bench and the great walnut tree into which you gradually gathered the people you love. After them come the ideas from the drawer, the four seasons, the new figures and the things you haven’t even managed to sketch yet. The sadness is there, because you wanted to see how they would look, but together with it there is something good — right to the very end the world was still giving you ideas. The last thought comes quite naturally: “I still had more to create.”

The trace in your life today

If you chose the unfinished work, perhaps in your present life too there is an activity you keep returning to without anyone making you. You may paint, write, play music, take photographs, sew, make jewelry, furniture, gardens, ceramics, invent stories or repair old things and lose track of how much time has passed. You may have studied for years, or the first feeling may have come long before any training. The most important trace is how naturally you return to it even after a long break. You set it aside for work, family and everything else, then months or years go by, and one day you pick up the pencil, the instrument, the camera or whatever you create with, and your hands seem to remember.

Exactly these things are easily left for the time when you will be freer. After the busy month, after the renovation, after the children grow up, after work eases off, after you finish everything else. Meanwhile the years go by and the wish keeps coming back, because clearly it was never a passing whim. It may never become a profession, and nobody may ever offer you money for it. That doesn’t change the fact that when you do it, you recognize a part of yourself that finds it hard to fit into the rest of the day.

If this image is yours, think of that activity you have long been saying you will “get back to when I have time.” Remember when you first said it and see how many years have passed since. Then, in place of waiting for a free month, a free year or some wonderful future period when all obligations will have magically ended, find time for one small part of it now. It may be one sheet, one page, one photograph, half an hour with your tools or the first sketch of an idea you have carried with you for a long time. There can always be more plans left in the drawer, because a person who loves to create will probably never run out of things they want to make. It is better if among them there are also a few stories already begun, still bearing the marks of your own hands.

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