Mnemonic (26 page)

But alas, I forgot to bring the camera the next morning, and already workers were painting the rich rough brick a dark red. I know it's probably entirely justifiable in terms of preservation, but the plain brick was much lovelier, and I was disappointed I had missed my chance to make my own record of that beauty.

In the material I've read about the painted monasteries, like Putna (the one the monks were chanting in and which appeared in
Sweet Bucovina
), there are duelling opinions about the restoration of the frescoes — whether there is more integrity in letting them fade with time or in refreshing them to keep their saints and animals vital. In the YouTube clip I watched, I saw Orthodox monks painting frescoes and relief-carving as part of an ongoing tradition of work and worship. The frescoes are alive and lively — there is such animation in the painted walls at Sucevita, for example, where angels battle demons for the souls of those ascending to heaven. Yet here I am, wishing that the operating theatre could retain its plain brick facade. I realize I'm erratic in my expectations of this building in which I've seen echoes of the monasteries of my grandfather's homeland. I wonder if my grandfather knew about, or visited, any of the Bukovina monasteries. Were their frescoes familiar to him? Did he recognize the saints of his church in the bold figures on horses, haloed in gold? And what about those deep Voronet-blue skies with the quirky stars?

My son painted a floor cloth for me, taking a figure from
Sweet Bucovina
— an elongated horse and rider, elegant spear, the blue sky pierced with golden stars. And it spoke to me in imagery I could almost understand, the way my hand reaches to make the sign of the cross when I enter a church, even though I was never confirmed, and only ever attended Catholic services a couple of times in my life, when my father wanted company at Christmas or Easter. The rest of the year we went to a United Church. During this time, thinking about my grandfather, my father, and looking at photographs in a book about Bukovina where I find their faces (and my own) in those pages, I decide to raise the cloth from the floor to the wall of my house, my own fragment of fresco, my own saint.

I am thinking of the ways in which we are imprinted by our history, an abstract tattoo. How a small package of papers transfers names, images, a modest sum of money cabled from Franklin Furnace to Galicia in 1910, and begins the process of creating a text of my grandfather — large empty spaces scribbled here and there with a word, a booklet of military service, an image of a woman, nameless and beautiful. Even a small card, registering one Remington 1900 12-gauge single action shotgun, serial number 92005, on August 21, 1940: my grandfather's Racial Origin is noted as “Austra” (
sic
). The registration is certified by Thomas Johnson, the Chief Constable of Beverly, Alberta. My grandfather has signed in an uncertain hand, as though a child in the very beginning years of school, who has learned enough cursive lettering to form his own name. I use my finger to trace his name as though I am touching his skin, the shape of his life.

There's a story I've read in several sources, in differing forms, about the eureka moment which led to Gutenberg's first experiments with printing. As was the practice in Europe in the early fifteenth century, he had incised some letters into a piece of beech bark. Wrapping the damp bark in a piece of paper to take home, he was delighted to discover later that the text was imprinted on the paper. This sounds apocryphal to me. Paper would not have been a common commodity in those years, and I doubt it would have been available for such casual purposes, though papyrus was used and reused until about the eighth century; old scrolls were recycled in a number of intriguing ways, including as the cartonnage or wrapping around mummies. Unwrapping them, archaeologists find poems, census records, religious tracts, maps of ancient cities.

Surely Gutenberg had some experience printing block books from sawn wood. From the pivotal moment in history when he developed his skills to the point where he was printing from type, the traditional scriptoriums and copyist workshops could barely keep up with the demand for texts. Religious, philosophical, and scientific works jostled with the more practical materials needed by merchants; universities needed multiple copies of Greek and Roman manuscripts. Knowledge and information were filtering into a broader spectrum of the population, and printing facilitated this process.

Gutenberg's gift was really to bring together a number of processes which had arguably been around for a time — moveable type (the Chinese had a version in ceramic dating from the eleventh century; the Koreans used bronze a little later), using an oil-based ink, adapting a wine or olive press to apply consistent pressure from the inked type to paper, using a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony for his type, and figuring out matrices which would produce the type in uniform sizes and forms. The woodblocks of the period were carved from beech, an homage to those ur-texts on bark. Thin slices of beech were commonly used for the boards, which bound the quartos together, covered in leather or paper or linen.

My husband labours in our print shop over type, chases, ornaments, and the unwieldy nature of ink. There are far more convenient ways to transfer texts to paper, but this suits his meditative nature, and mine too, for I love to think of the slow work of poetry finding its way to a broadsheet. Paper impressed with ink, like a kiss, a tattoo. Or the history of a man I barely knew available to me in cryptic moments on paper, some of it in a script I can't even read.

He was in Calgary all day, my mother said. In Calgary. Not in the Royal Jubilee Hospital on 3C in Victoria, not home with my mum, nor fishing in one of the lakes he loved. Not even sleeping the peaceful sleep of a happy man who had no memory. No, in his mind he was in Calgary where my brother lives, the one who gave up on him, wouldn't call or write, even then, at the end of my father's life.

For some months my husband and I had a trip planned, and although part of me felt that we should cancel it and stay close to home for the duration of my father's final days, we decided to travel. My mother urged us to go, saying that there was no way of knowing how long my father would live and that I had helped her to prepare for what was to come (we'd gone to offices for forms, met with medical social workers). I promised to phone her every few days.

In Paris, I had a sense of how my grandfather must have felt stepping ashore at Ellis Island — the voices unintelligble, apart from a word here (
merci
) and there (
pardon
). On the one hand, our language is the thing most familiar to us after our families; on the other, it can create a barrier between us and the world, an invisible but impenetrable wall. My small French (
un petit peu
) as I shopped in the Marais for the makings of our dinner at the tiny flat on Rue Aubriot; his Ukrainian as his lungs were checked, his teeth examined. How brave they were, those people who walked into North America from the old forests and fields of Eastern Europe, a photograph kept in their luggage for safe passage. How willing to go underground to labour at coal seams, to sleep in railroad camps, sending small sums of money back to their families. To harness themselves to ploughs, to settle in sod houses, earth dropping on their tables while smoke from crozzling fires filled their lungs. To learn a new language. To shape unfamiliar letters into a semblance of their names.

My analogy — my French, his English — is of course indulgent. I travel in relative luxury, by plane and train, not on foot, without money, or perhaps hungry. But to find oneself a foreigner in a strange land: I try to imagine him walking from Kananaskis to Edmonton, or finding a way, whatever way, from Ellis Island to Franklin Furnace to Glace Bay and then west. I am looking for a way to connect to him, however tangentially.

At the huge flea market near Porte de Clignancourt, we found one booth of tables filled with wooden type, large letters — forty-eight point, or bigger, many of them, suitable for posters — and briefly considered buying some. But we'd need a lot to print anything with (think of how many vowels are used in a short sentence, how often an “s,” a “t” . . . ) and the letters would take up so much room in our luggage. I ran my thumb along one letter, an X, and wondered if it was beech. It was hard, and dirty with old ink. Some came off on my hands. For days, the ink lurked in the deep creases of my palms, reminding me of its archaic utility.

In Venice, a death.

O the metaphysics of time: that I could stand at a phone kiosk on the Campo San Pantalon, calling my mother on a Saturday evening in November to reach her as she drank her morning coffee. “I won't lie to you,” she told me. “He has a cough that the nurses say means he will probably die this weekend.” Her weekend was beginning while mine was half-finished.

When I entered the churches of Venice to look at Tintorettos and Tiepolos, sometimes it seemed appropriate to light a candle for my father. It wasn't my religion but it had been his, and I thought that the light of those tall white tapers was something he would have approved of. A few words only, to ask peace for him, surrounded by images of death and resurrection, and the silence of the long-eyed madonnas. I felt closest to him on Torcello, at the ancient Santa Fosca, its Greek-cross interior echoing the churches of my grandfather's Bukovina. I lit a candle there in the silence, asking for grace.

A day later, he was gone. “Last night,” they told me when I called again and reached my daughter, my mother, and my youngest brother at the hospital, packing up my father's clothing. It was morning for them and I was on the Campo again, in darkness, the sombre beautiful buildings lining the canals, while all over the city church bells rang out the hours and gondoliers waited with their elegant black boats. At dinner we toasted my father with red wine and offered each other memories: a camping trip where my father taught my sons to fish, made them pancakes, took them out in his dinghy. The time he found a small wheel and made a child-sized wheelbarrow to complete it. We returned to our hotel where the patron smiled as we open the door, his parrot on his shoulder. “My father died,” I told him — to explain the tears. He nodded gravely, made a motion with his hands to indicate that everything turns over, and said he would like to come back as a flower.