Рох Кэрриер. Рассказы. Roch Carrier. Stories

The Shoemaker

Before we bought our house it had belonged to a shoemaker who died in it when he was very old. My mother described him to us: short and bent over because he'd spent his whole life stitching leather. The little shoemaker limped: he had a clubfoot and one leg was shorter than the other. He made his own shoes because he wouldn't have been able to find in any store the small, thick-soled boot shaped like a horse's hoof for his crippled foot.

There was a very low attic on the top of the lean-to attached to our house. That was where our mother used to store boxes of clothing that would be worn by the other children when they arrived. She would let us climb up the stepladder with her. With our heads jutting through the opening in the ceiling, our glances would fall on boxes, suitcases, old magazines. framed photographs — things in the attic which, in the beam of the flashlight, seemed to be whispering secrets. Perched on the stepladder, with my head in a trapdoor which was scarcely higher than the attic floor, I would ascend into a dream from which my mother had to snatch me away. Climbing down the stepladder, I would always return from it a little dazed. In one corner of the attic was a pile of the shoemaker's tools. They didn't belong to us. The tools were waiting as though the shoemaker would come back and use them: rolled-up strips of leather, shoes to which he hadn't had time to attach the soles, spindles of thread, punches, an awl, a currier's beam with long wooden tongs that held the leather as he sewed it, a tripod, shoemaker's knives. My mother explained what all the tools were used for, but she didn't touch them. Often at night, before I fell asleep, I thought about the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who had lived in our house and died there, and whose tools were still waiting for him.

In those days we knew that man dies only to be reborn. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that if the little shoemaker's tools were still in our attic — and his leather and his thread — he would come back to carry on his trade. The roof cracked, a nail creaked in the wood: in my bed I knew that the little shoemaker had returned. I burrowed deep in the mattress and pulled the sheet over my head. I fell asleep.

One morning I saw my shoes by the bed, with brand new soles made of fine, shiny leather; the worn-down heels had been replaced; my shoes were new again.

'Who did that?' I cried as I ran down the stairs. My shoes look even nicer than when they were new!'

'Your shoes were so worn-out it was a disgrace,' said my mother, who was feeding my little brother from a spoon. 'Last night while you were asleep I took them to the new shoemaker.'

I went back up to my room, suspecting my mother hadn't told me the truth. There are so many things that parents don't want to tell children, so many things they refused to explain to me, so many things I couldn't understand till I was grown up. This time, though, I guessed. I knew, even though my mother hadn't wanted to tell me the truth. During the night my shoes had been repaired by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot!

I left for school earlier than usual. There was something in our village more important than the sun shining down on us: my shoes. Their gleam was more dazzling than the September morning. I didn't walk to school, nor did I run: I flew. My new soles, sewn on by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who had come back to earth at night to ply his trade in our house, didn't really rest on the ground the way cows' feet did, or horses, or my schoolmates: they made me fly, though I still looked like someone who was walking. I knew, though, that I was flying. I had been initiated into one of the great mysteries that dwell in the night. I knew that the little shoemaker with the clubfoot had come, I'd heard him limp, heard him pick up his tools and put them down in the attic.

Everyone at our school wore shoes. The nuns wouldn't have tolerated a barefoot student and no mother would dare send a barefoot child to the village school. In the schools on the concession roads more than a mile from the village, little schools built beside the dusty gravel roads, many of the children didn't wear shoes, but we who went to the village school proudly wore shoes. It wasn't until after school that the children of large families would take their shoes off so as not to wear them out too much.

When I arrived in the schoolyard the others immediately noticed my shoes. My classmates came closer to look at them. I went to stand against the big willow, the boys' meeting place, to show them off.

'You got new shoes!'

'Lucky you.'

'I have to wear my brother's shoes when they get too small for him, but when they're too small for him they're too worn out for me.'

I began to explain, sitting on the books I carried in a canvas bag.

'These aren't new shoes. They're my old ones. While I was asleep...'

And I told my schoolmates, sitting on their books like me, how my shoes had been rebuilt in the night by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who used to live in our house before he died, and whose tools were still there.

A harsh laugh struck me like a slap in the face, interrupting my story; one of the big boys had come over to listen to me and he was laughing, holding his stomach.

'Listen to him! Did the atomic bomb land on your head?'

A few days earlier the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and it had burned alive thousands of women, men and children.

We heard about it on the radio, L'Action catholique had probably written something about it on the front page and my parents had most likely talked about the article in L'Action catholique — but I have to admit that I don't remember Hiroshima.

I searched through my memory, trying to find that childhood day, the way you search page by page, paragraph by paragraph, for a passage in a book you've already read. But instead of recalling something that burned so brightly it could have set fire to a corner of my memory, painfully, all I could remember of that autumn day was the little shoemaker with the clubfoot.

That gap in my recollections still irritates me, but a man likely doesn't choose what will come to haunt his memory.

In thenext life, when the people of Hiroshima remember this earth, they will seeagain the bright explosion that wrenched their bodies from their souls. But Iwish they could remember instead a little shoemaker with a clubfoot who, as theywere sleeping, came and mended shoes worn out from having played too much onthe earth covered with dandelions and daisies.