Little Shoes for an Invisible Road

The highest shelf in a shoemaker's workshop always holds not the newest things but the most silent ones. The ones that were made for the road but never saw the road. Once I rode out to Yakym, a good three villages away, to have my old boots restitched - people had recommended him to me as the best craftsman anywhere around. While he was measuring my foot, I noticed a pair of children's shoes up top. Small ones, of leather, with poppies embroidered on the toes.

They looked almost brand new, and the soles gleamed as if someone had been carefully rubbing them with wax. Yakym was a quiet man. His fingers were scarred from the awl, and his gaze was too deep. I couldn't hold back and asked whose treasure he kept up there under the ceiling. The craftsman's hand stopped, he ran his palm over the leather and said quietly: for my daughter. The girl had been born weak, tender as the first grass after the snow.

He told me what people said: that her feet would never walk any road. And Yakym didn't argue with people. He just made the little shoes. He worked on them for three months. He chose the softest leather, thinned the sole until it bent like a leaf, embroidered the poppies in tiny stitches, as if he were planting them not on shoes but on hope. When he brought them to his daughter, she stroked those poppies with her fingers for a long time and smiled. Stand up she could not.

But every spring, when the snow melted and the earth began to smell of wet road, Yakym would take the shoes down from the shelf, work the wax soft in his palms and rub the soles as carefully as if tomorrow they had a very long way to go. People saw those shoes on the shelf and whispered that Yakym was still waiting for a miracle that had long since passed his house by. One evening I was held up in their village and stopped in to see him.

The workshop smelled of oil, of leather, and a little of food. By the window sat his daughter, thin and light as a candle before an icon. On her lap lay those same red shoes. She was touching the poppies and telling her father where she would have walked in them today. To the river, she said. Through the wet grass. And then she would stand barefoot in the cold water.

Yakym listened with half-closed eyes and nodded as if he himself could hear the water splashing under her feet. Then I understood why he waxed those soles. For the road his daughter walked in her imagination. So that road wouldn't be hard. So the shoes wouldn't crack with time.

So that in the house there would remain a place where the impossible doesn't hurt, but quietly lives. Care is not always leading a person to where they cannot go. Sometimes care is keeping their shoes ready for invisible roads.