The view from Henrich’s repair shop window is less than spectacular. Thick grime filters the passing headlights, and the stoplight’s carnival colours scatter and fade across rust, asphalt, and peeling paint. Dust cakes in thick sediment on the windowsills, disturbed only by flies. Henrich considers the creaky building and wonders when someone had cared enough to wipe up the dust.
From time to time, Henrich shakes his head and curses his poor judgement. Once, he had the opportunity to own this crumbling, dying building. He had been its sole tenant for some twenty years. Barred only by his own apprehension and pride, he watched the ownership change hands. Then he watched his earnings flow to the account of his absent landlord who never bothered to fix the drafts or replace the cracking windowpanes.
The dust covers everything. Old TVs and radios gather it like magnets attracting iron filings. Henrich knows that the lingering static charge in his pile of obsolete implements is a flame to tiny moths of grit and dirt and fine particulates. But he doesn’t bother to clean it up. An exercise in futility, he reminds himself. His workbench is clean, and his preferred tools are easy to discern – they aren’t filthy like the others.
Time is the undoing of many things. Dust gathers and seasons change. Things rust. The omnipresent acid of life-giving oxygen chews on machines like a scavenger picking at carrion. Gears fail and joints break. The spark fades. The energy dies out. Time has carried on for too long inside the walls of this building.
But time is a secondary curse in Henrich’s shop. The first is his pride. Pride is the dust. When the building sold, he resolved to do nothing further to extend its life. Perhaps he was cursing himself with a similar fate. As his surroundings decay, his fingers grow unsteady and his fine-detail work is shaky. He denies or ignores (which is worse?) that his arthritic fingers foreshadow the end of his career. The dust of age in his ligaments and tendons hardens.
Pride was taught as a virtue in his family. Henrich’s father was an enlisted man before the loss of sight in one eye forced his early retirement. An immensely proud and stubborn man, he refused to wear an eye-patch and spent his adult life terrifying small children with his scars. His sight was broken, and the whole world was scarred in his view.
Memories of his father holding a stopwatch as he raced around a dirt track creep into Henrich’s thoughts. He loathed those days. His father watched as he ran and lifted and pushed-up and sat-up and chinned-up and fell down into the dust of the empty lot every Sunday morning. His weekly physical, carefully documented. His father was determined to make a man out of him. Henrich was likewise determined to prove that such physical tasks were not the only measure of manhood. But not so determined that he would ever say so in front of his father.
Henrich had never been especially strong. His slight frame came from his mother – a petite but fierce woman. He did not inherit her ferocity. He was far more resigned to what he believed to be his fate. She did not accept such limitations and was soon rid of Henrich and his father, and their pride. Henrich’s physical weakness disappointed his father. It was only pride, and his need to appease his father, that extracted him from his books and his gadgets and forced him out to the field each week.
His father died of a heart attack while timing one of his rope-climbs. Henrich had just graduated from high school. The first round of acceptance letters from the country’s technical colleges and schools of engineering arrived the next day. Most of them he kept. They remain, unopened, in a small filing cabinet in the corner of his shop. A dense layer of grey and brown conceals the once black drawers and handles. Once there was a shine, but now everything is dull.
Henrich used his small inheritance to buy tools and supplies. These were meant to last until some imagined future in which his reliance on a few small contracts and the occasional passer-by with a broken appliance no longer meant the difference between eating and going hungry. He imagines such a future, but never realizes it.
Perhaps it was pride, he considers, that kept him from accepting the charity and well-intentioned offers from people who knew him and his father. Perhaps it is echoes of the same sin that keep him at his workbench until the small hours of the morning, long after the dust settles and the lights fade.
An outside observer might see a life spent well below its threshold of potential. They might see a life that is fading in dim quarters like an inmate sentenced to die at twilight. But they might only see the dust. Perhaps they would stop outside of the window, peek through, and try to imagine which came first – the dust, or the man?
For a brief moment, Henrich closes his eyes and leans back from his work. He replaces his tools in their cradles and breathes deeply, inhaling mostly impurities. Heat from his soldering iron disturbs the air. A small plume of smoke emits from the tip, acrid and harsh, though less so than Henrich’s thoughts. “I suppose,” he thinks to himself, “that I should have left this place some time ago.” He pauses for a moment to consider the dust, and the ashes (from whence he came), then returns to his task.
From time to time, Henrich shakes his head and curses his poor judgement. Once, he had the opportunity to own this crumbling, dying building. He had been its sole tenant for some twenty years. Barred only by his own apprehension and pride, he watched the ownership change hands. Then he watched his earnings flow to the account of his absent landlord who never bothered to fix the drafts or replace the cracking windowpanes.
The dust covers everything. Old TVs and radios gather it like magnets attracting iron filings. Henrich knows that the lingering static charge in his pile of obsolete implements is a flame to tiny moths of grit and dirt and fine particulates. But he doesn’t bother to clean it up. An exercise in futility, he reminds himself. His workbench is clean, and his preferred tools are easy to discern – they aren’t filthy like the others.
Time is the undoing of many things. Dust gathers and seasons change. Things rust. The omnipresent acid of life-giving oxygen chews on machines like a scavenger picking at carrion. Gears fail and joints break. The spark fades. The energy dies out. Time has carried on for too long inside the walls of this building.
But time is a secondary curse in Henrich’s shop. The first is his pride. Pride is the dust. When the building sold, he resolved to do nothing further to extend its life. Perhaps he was cursing himself with a similar fate. As his surroundings decay, his fingers grow unsteady and his fine-detail work is shaky. He denies or ignores (which is worse?) that his arthritic fingers foreshadow the end of his career. The dust of age in his ligaments and tendons hardens.
Pride was taught as a virtue in his family. Henrich’s father was an enlisted man before the loss of sight in one eye forced his early retirement. An immensely proud and stubborn man, he refused to wear an eye-patch and spent his adult life terrifying small children with his scars. His sight was broken, and the whole world was scarred in his view.
Memories of his father holding a stopwatch as he raced around a dirt track creep into Henrich’s thoughts. He loathed those days. His father watched as he ran and lifted and pushed-up and sat-up and chinned-up and fell down into the dust of the empty lot every Sunday morning. His weekly physical, carefully documented. His father was determined to make a man out of him. Henrich was likewise determined to prove that such physical tasks were not the only measure of manhood. But not so determined that he would ever say so in front of his father.
Henrich had never been especially strong. His slight frame came from his mother – a petite but fierce woman. He did not inherit her ferocity. He was far more resigned to what he believed to be his fate. She did not accept such limitations and was soon rid of Henrich and his father, and their pride. Henrich’s physical weakness disappointed his father. It was only pride, and his need to appease his father, that extracted him from his books and his gadgets and forced him out to the field each week.
His father died of a heart attack while timing one of his rope-climbs. Henrich had just graduated from high school. The first round of acceptance letters from the country’s technical colleges and schools of engineering arrived the next day. Most of them he kept. They remain, unopened, in a small filing cabinet in the corner of his shop. A dense layer of grey and brown conceals the once black drawers and handles. Once there was a shine, but now everything is dull.
Henrich used his small inheritance to buy tools and supplies. These were meant to last until some imagined future in which his reliance on a few small contracts and the occasional passer-by with a broken appliance no longer meant the difference between eating and going hungry. He imagines such a future, but never realizes it.
Perhaps it was pride, he considers, that kept him from accepting the charity and well-intentioned offers from people who knew him and his father. Perhaps it is echoes of the same sin that keep him at his workbench until the small hours of the morning, long after the dust settles and the lights fade.
An outside observer might see a life spent well below its threshold of potential. They might see a life that is fading in dim quarters like an inmate sentenced to die at twilight. But they might only see the dust. Perhaps they would stop outside of the window, peek through, and try to imagine which came first – the dust, or the man?
For a brief moment, Henrich closes his eyes and leans back from his work. He replaces his tools in their cradles and breathes deeply, inhaling mostly impurities. Heat from his soldering iron disturbs the air. A small plume of smoke emits from the tip, acrid and harsh, though less so than Henrich’s thoughts. “I suppose,” he thinks to himself, “that I should have left this place some time ago.” He pauses for a moment to consider the dust, and the ashes (from whence he came), then returns to his task.
Love the imagery, John. Beautifully written.
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