The Cuban desk

The begin­nings of this mahogany desk from my dad’s house are not known for sure. The wood is very like­ly from Cuba, which is in itself a sad sto­ry, as this entire­ly renew­able resource was com­plete­ly wiped off from the region through cat­a­stroph­ic mis­man­age­ment. In any case, the desk arrived in the hands of a Sovi­et diplo­mat in the island.

The diplo­mat must have trav­eled around the world, and the desk land­ed in the Embassy of the USSR in Brus­sels, Bel­gium. The Embassy then donat­ed it to the Com­mu­nist Youth in Brus­sels. The orga­ni­za­tion shared its office with the Mai­son de Jeunes “1917” in the city, where my father worked in the six­ties and sev­en­ties. Pre­dictably, the occu­pants, a large group of young, loud, opin­ion­at­ed peo­ple with a knack for throw­ing par­ties and host­ing taste­ful live music, failed to take care of it prop­er­ly, and it fell into disrepair.

At some point, my father was asked to car­ry out elec­tric­i­ty cabling work in the Com­mu­nist Youth’s offices, where he spot­ted the desk. It was scratched, parts were miss­ing, and the leather cov­er was torn. An arrange­ment was made, my dad did the work for free and walked off with the desk.

At that time, my father was gath­er­ing old and inter­est­ing fur­ni­ture found in var­i­ous places, and learn­ing to restore them. Togeth­er with his part­ner at the time, he worked on the desk and they restored it com­plete­ly. He couldn’t find new draw­er han­dles to replace the miss­ing ones, so he had some forged based on the exist­ing ones at Sif­fleur in the city.

I was born in 1983. Short­ly after, he drove down to the French Riv­iera, found a job, and my moth­er and I joined him there, start­ing a new life. He brought all of his cher­ished fur­ni­ture with him, and so I have always known this desk, as well as half a dozen oth­er pieces of fur­ni­ture with sim­i­lar­ly inter­est­ing sto­ries. My dad always said that a good piece of wood­en fur­ni­ture was nicer to look at than a painting.

Last May, my dad lost all hope of recov­er­ing from of a long-term med­ical con­di­tion. At the time, the covid19 pan­dem­ic had just hit Europe, and my uni­ver­si­ty had just switched to online teach­ing, so I was able to work remote­ly. Some air­lines were oper­at­ing again, so I flew down south. I brought with me a half-decent lap­top, a web­cam, a micro­phone, and a Wacom tablet, all snapped off Ebay in the weeks prior. 

And so I arrived at the desk. Over the course of the fol­low­ing weeks, I was able to spend time with my dad in his last bat­tle, at home, all while work­ing: pro­duc­ing lec­ture videos, week­ly quizzes, indi­vid­u­al­ized peer-grad­ed home­work assign­ments, inter­ac­tive Zoom ses­sions, and most­ly-com­plete lec­ture notes for my course in flu­id dynam­ics. I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tem­plate and appre­ci­ate the many bless­ings which allowed me to be there. The sup­port of my super­vi­sor and col­leagues. The love of close rel­a­tives. The patience of stu­dents. The resilience of many tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems upon which I depend­ed. And a blur­ry but strong inher­it­ed feel­ing for how to take life deci­sions and own­ing up to them. The desk was not par­tic­u­lar­ly com­fort­able, and I nev­er had time to fix the chair. But it was so fit­ting that I was able to work on this beau­ti­ful, sol­id, mas­sive-wood piece of my father’s life.

My father passed away in June. I flew back to Ger­many. I miss him. I don’t know what is going to hap­pen to the desk.