Sawdust and lacquer fumes are very bad for the lungs, but Joseph had been breathing them all his life and they made his heart merry. He figured that nothing that lightens his heart can be all that bad for the lungs. His shop was smallish and crammed. In the old country he had a much bigger shop and each of his various machines (let’s not pretend we can name any of them) had its own radius of private space. Joseph believed that just as he hated the feeling of another’s breath on his face (unless it was his wife’s) so do his machines hate being showered with the dusty breath of other machines. But people have to bear it sometimes, and his machines had to bear it too. This was all the space he could afford, and he knew he was lucky to even have this much, so he never complained and counted on his machines and tools to recognize that he had done his best for them and to repay him with a well-oiled smooth operation.
Joseph was a loving and attentive craftsman. Everything that came out of his shop had been looked upon with the tender affection of a father delighting in his children. No chair, or table, or cabinet he ever made had a single ray or spindle that looked like it was straining to bear weight. No panel ever appeared overstressed or disharmonious. Joseph liked to say that if you expect to be comfortable in a chair, first the chair must be comfortable with itself.
In the old country it was not a great honor to be a craftsman. He had thoroughly disappointed his parents when, foregoing the college education he had been slated for, he undertook an apprenticeship and started making furniture. Joseph still remembered the awful fight and his parents’ desperate and dire admonitions. In their dark version of the future, he was supposed to have been destitute, lonely, and degraded by now. Joseph knew better than to fault his parents for their faithlessness, especially now that he had children of his own. He knew that nine out of ten craftsmen ended up exactly as his parents had foretold, and though it was tempting to say that God had not kissed them as he had him, Joseph knew that this too was not necessarily true. Not the whole story, anyways. But let us say, though Joseph himself would never say it, that God did kiss him. He was, by all accounts, a rare and wonderful craftsman. In the early days he had nearly starved, making elaborate dining room and bedroom sets for a fraction of their true cost. But word about him spread quickly and before long he was able to hire more helpers and make real money. Even after immigrating he gave his parents no reason to wag a finger. He certainly did fine for himself, for which he was deeply grateful. And yet…

With his thick and rough fingers, grainy like sandpaper, Joseph ran over the smooth curves of his latest creation – a stately oaken dining room chair with carved armrests and a sturdy tall back. He turned it this way and that, checked that all the crevices were smooth and all the spindles well-balanced. He patted all the different parts and delighted in smooth, river-polished pebble feeling they gave him. He then stood the chair upright and sat in it. It rocked gently because Joseph had not attached one of the shoes and one of the four feet was slightly shorter than the rest. Nonetheless, the chair was nice to sit it. In another’s hands oak, in its hardness and stately grace, has the habit of evoking existential dread, but Joseph’s chair felt accommodating and gentle – like a garment that fits exactly right, or like when you find just the right spice to finish off a dish. Joseph lingered in it for another moment. He deserved the rest, and he wanted another moment of communion with the fruit of his labor, in which he will never sit again. This was the sixth and last chair in a set. Once he finished it, the whole set would be done and ready for shipment. From where he sat, he could see the other five standing in the corner of his workshop and sighed. It was time to attach the last shoe.
Though Joseph had experienced this many times before, what came next never failed to knock the breath right out of him.

There were so many forms of magic in this world that Joseph had always believed in. The magic of hope, for example. But actual fairytale magic? A pixy dust, “poof” sort of magic? What sane adult believes in that? And Joseph was nothing if not sane. And yet. He will sooner forget the sun and the stars than the first time it happened to him – the very first piece of furniture he ever made in his new country and as soon as he finished the final stroke that allowed him to say “huh! It is done!” – poof! It shrank and was suddenly no bigger than a delicate mouse-house toy. He couldn’t tell you how he felt then: Like fainting, or maybe like going out running in the street and yelling, or maybe like calling his wife and asking her to come pick him up and drop him off at the psych ER. But he did none of those things. Instead, he went home and told his wife he might have a fever and stayed in bed for two days. After that he went back to the workshop and finished another piece that had been waiting for him almost done. When that piece immediately shrank as well, he accepted it. New country – a new kind of life. That’s when he became a miniaturist.
As he turned the chair over and prepared the shoe and the hammer, he rehearsed to himself: “as soon as the final nail goes in there will be darkness, but don’t worry, it will be very brief. You will feel a rush of wind that will chill you without making you feel cold. How can that be, by the way? Anyway, that’s how it will feel. Then it will be all over. Ready? Okay, let’s do it.” A moment later Joseph picked up his lovely chair and cradled it in the palm of his hand. Even though it was tiny, it still had a nice weight to it, a heft that made it feel somehow significant. Joseph looked it over lovingly. Come little friend. Come join your brothers. Now your little family is complete. He placed it carefully amongst its miniature kin. It was good work, and he knew it.
Unfortunately, children are taught that humility and pride are opposites. They are not. Joseph was a quiet and humble man. How could he be otherwise, having lived the itinerant life he’d lived. But he was also proud. Not one man in a thousand could make such a comfortable living furnishing doll houses, and not one in ten thousand immigrant men with odd features and halting, accented speech that rolled along like one of the crumbling, pothole-studded roads in his hometown. Yes, Joseph was proud.
And yet…there used to be a time, many years ago now, in the old country when real people sat in his chairs and ate at his tables. There was a time when his children, only babies then, would be at someone’s house and would be told that their father had made the stool they were trying to climb. There was a time when what he made was… real. In his dreams Joseph sometimes wandered through grey-lit and dusty hallways with doors opening on either side. Sunlight entered through unseen skylights and gained corporeal golden-glow form in rays of dust. Joseph waved his hand in front of his eyes and the dust parted for him. He opened this door and that and peered inside. In each darkened room half-shadow figures, usually entire families, moved in slow motion to accomplish some mundane task, like passing a dish around a table. And in each room, magnificent furniture. Furniture he seemed to have known long ago, or furniture he wished to know. Though Joseph knew that his true desire was to break the tableau and enter a room, his dream avatar just kept on walking down the hall toward the next door and the next. When he woke up from these dreams the knowledge that he would never make furniture for families again made him sad. Joseph was the humble servant only of doll families now.

On the whole though, Joseph was a happy man. What was this scaling down of his furniture compared to the opportunities he was now able to give his children or, let’s be honest, the comfort he was able to win for himself? But a couple of years ago, Joseph had allowed his middle son, the one of his three children most resonant with him of his three children, to watch him work. He recalled he had been working on an ornate china cabinet. His son came to the shop every day after school for an entire week and even helped Joseph polish, paint, and lacquer. Since Joseph always had to omit a small detail until the moment of completion, this cabinet was missing one of its ball-knob handles. Then the day came when Joseph had to make a decision: will he allow his son to be present for the final attachment of the missing handle? He arrived at a compromise. He would allow his son to come, but would have him leave the room for the final transformation. Joseph will never forget his son’s eyes when he re-entered the room and Joseph laid the intricate little piece in his hand. He remembered his son turning it over, opening and closing the delicate little doors, and carefully tracing his fingers over the tiny pirouettes of wood he had helped polish only days before. But Joseph soon realized that the grey pools of his son’s eyes contained something different, or at least something in addition to fascination and appreciation. He realized with a kick of pain that it was pity. His son cradled the cabinet like one would cradle a wounded, flightless bird before giving it back to his father without looking him in the eye. They never really talked about that day, but his son never again helped him work. In fact, come to think of it, this was the last time he was ever in the shop.
What did he learn that day, Joseph wondered. Joseph knew that some of the pity he had seen in his son’s eyes was not for the cabinet but for him, Joseph, who worked so hard but couldn’t make a real cabinet. What made Joseph particularly sad was that his son had been three years old when they left the old country, and far too young to really remember the days when Joseph made real furniture. His son, Joseph knew, saw him only as a miniaturist. But to see the shrinking of his labor so bluntly like this – maybe that was the wrong thing to show him. What did he think all of this meant for him, and about him? If his children ever grew to view themselves only as miniaturists too, Joseph would be devastated. If that ever happened, Joseph would wish he had never left the old country, whatever its struggles and complexities might have been. But Joseph’s children seemed fine, and most of the time he was able not to worry about it.
Joseph double-checked that his packing job was flawless— his set of chairs had a long journey ahead of them—and turned his attention to his next order. It was an exciting job—an order from a wealthy and expert doll collector, a real connoisseur of miniature furniture and a client worthy of Joseph’s skill. His eyes began to sparkle as he immersed himself in his detailed notes and sketches.

Copyright © 2024 Anna Braverman