The chimney sweep

January 22, 2020

Every year in October, a white van parks on the side-street. There’s a chubby man coming out of the vehicle wearing dark clothes. It’s time for the annual chimney sweeping, and that man carries tools that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It is a noble profession, even if his hands become dirty afterward. It’s not the same kind of dirt as the one in the hands of politicians or bankers. The chimney sweeper gasps while taking the stairs, that chubby man struggles to go through the narrow window that drives him to the roof.

But the moment the man steps on the roof, he transforms suddenly into a dancer, it’s as if he’s now the chimney sweeper in Mary Poppins. He knows exactly where to walk, and he’s not scared. His breath returns to normal, and, all of a sudden, resembles a lonely king. I don’t have the heart to observe him thoroughly, let alone step on that roof. Fear is a strong sentiment for me, but apparently not for that man. And that’s how once again the chimney sweeping starts.

*

I‘m not the biggest fan of William Blake, but every year this day I think of him. I remember his poem, The Chimney Sweeper, talking about child labor in England of the 18th and 19th centuries. Young boys, not older than five years old, were sold to clean chimneys due to their small size. They’d go up and down the chimneys several times, and this was some form of slavery. The ones that didn’t die after falling down the chimneys would die early due to lung diseases.

The poem by William Blake appeared in two parts. The first one belongs to the Songs of Innocence (1789), and it’s the story of a young chimney sweeper narrating a dream where an angel saves young kids from the coffin and drives them to a meadow. In the second part, which belongs to the Songs of Experience (1793), an adult accidentally meets a young chimney sweeper abandoned in the cold while his parents attend a service in the church.

Blake’s first poem starts with a heartbreaking verse: When my mother died, I was very young. I probably remember the verse due to the similarity with the opening line of Camus’ Stranger.

*

The chimney sweeper on my roof is not a Joe or Ned or Jack like in Blake’s poetry. He has an odd Eastern European name that I always fail to recall. “I come from Warsaw,” he said the first time, but as the years went by, he started taking some distance from the capital of Poland. It’s as if the years in a foreign land redefine the miles within him. “I actually come from a suburb 10 minutes out of Warsaw,” he claimed the fourth time. And every year, the distance grows steadily by a few miles. According to his latest update, he comes from a small village an hour away from Warsaw. He used to clean chimneys there, too.

At least, he works for a company now, and he doesn’t have to go up and down the chimneys of fireplaces, gas stoves, or wood stoves, like the little kids in Blake’s poem. He has a tall brush with him, the tallest I’ve ever seen. He carries it in his right arm like a spear. Then, when he stands in front of the chimney, he detaches the cap and tucks the brush all the way down the dirty barrel. Up and down, several times, until everything is removed. Dead smoke comes straight to his face, but he, fortunately, wears a mask. He is a tall blond man that looks like a southern European after the work is done. Smoke and dust sit everywhere: on his face, on his clothes, on his mustache.

Gravity helps the process of chimney cleaning. When everything is done on the roof, the man enters the house from the same narrow window. He starts to gasp again, and he is not a dancer anymore. He goes down to the fireplace, and he collects everything that has fallen. The vacuum cleaner roars, and the black bits and pieces clink in the machine’s stomach like the coins that Joes and Neds and Jacks received once up a time.

*

And then, he transforms once again. It’s the time of payment, and he recites the services that he offered. He talks as if he’s the chimney doctor -and he probably is. But my dad is a retired mathematician, and he has a thing for numbers. Every handyman in this house has to go through bargaining. And the man doing the chimney sweeping is not an exception. He names a price, and there starts the dialogue.

“So, it is X euros for the chimney sweeping.”

“X euros is too much. I never made X euros for half an hour of work,” my dad says.

“Sorry, Sir, but I worked for an hour.”

“I never made so much money, even in an hour.”

“Fine. Give me X minus 10.”

“No, it’s still too much. You’ll get X minus 30.”

The chimney-sweeper lost his dad when he was still a kid. It could have been a character of Blake’s poems. He somehow stares at my father like a figure that was always absent in his life. And he also seems to enjoy bargaining. This basic mathematic talk goes on for a few minutes, and they settle for a price in the middle. Sometimes I think that we should add a Value Subtracted Tax in Greece.

They say goodbye, and the man walks towards the van with his spear-brush on the right arm. The chimney sweeping is, once again, over. I guess I’ll see him again next year. We’ll follow the same process: we will contact him by phone, and we’ll remind him of our home address. He will be, of course, up for business. It might be rainy; it might be sunny. But it doesn’t matter that much; he’s a dancer, and the weather doesn’t stress him. He will park the van on the side-street and will gasp while taking the stairs. The man that cleans the chimneys will have spent one more year in a foreign land. Next year, he might even claim that his village is closer to Krakow than to Warsaw.

More PS here | What Postscripts really are