Mnemonic (25 page)

Two of my brothers travelled to Victoria to visit my father and to help my mother. My third brother was estranged and wrote sad emails to say that he wanted no part of it. I thought of the immediacy of communication, that an email is transmitted to my electronic mailbox within seconds of being sent, a phone call connects two parties at the touch of a button, even a letter travelling between two cities takes three days at the best of times. We fly at the drop of a hat — or a message to say that a father has been taken to hospital and not expected to live. We think nothing (or everything) of a holiday in Mexico or Paris.

At the best of times, we were a family of six, with grandparents to visit in summers. But at the time of my father's last illness, spread out over Canada, with children of our own (and one brother in turn a grandfather seven times over), we had largely lost touch with one another, apart from the paperwork created by my father's imminent demise.

For my grandfather, a postcard must have been an occasion — because he kept one, a scene from the Granby Mine at Phoenix, among his papers. I know my father telephoned Beverly once or twice a year. Perhaps he wrote letters home. I don't remember. But I do remember parcels at Christmas, a cheque sent to buy a rocking chair for my grandmother who was then living with a daughter in Edmonton. I know nothing of the passage of letters or cards or cables from North America to Bukovina. I don't even know to whom such missives might have been sent. The broad-shouldered woman? The two girls standing side by side? Were they his sisters, maybe? Did he leave a mother behind, or his father? Any trace at all?

During my last visit to my father, when I was staying with my mother, my grandfather's original travel papers to North America came to light in an old envelope in my father's drawer. “Who will want these?” my mother asked, and I gladly brought the small packet home with me. Not quite a passport, but a booklet, in German, which a friend helped me to read. He was average height. Brown hair, blue eyes. We puzzled through a few of the other terms. The script was Gothic, and difficult.
Keine mitreisende
meant that no one else was travelling with him, and
Eine fahr
meant that he only had permission for a one-way journey.

While in Victoria visiting my dad, I had to walk a long corridor between hospital wings. Windows along one side of the corridor looked out to the chapel, built in 1909 — a handsome building with a five-sided apse and a stained glass window. It was nice to pass the building, and it didn't occur to me that one might enter it during a quiet moment. Then it did occur to me, and I found the entrance from the second floor of the corridor. My dad was on the third floor, so the entrance hadn't presented itself during those first few walks from the elevator to his ward.

I'm not a Christian. I was raised in a church-going family, but the concept of one god never made sense to me, especially not after I'd looked through a book about the Third Reich when I was ten and saw photographs taken at the liberation of Belsen. Around the same time, a Sunday School teacher, a woman who favoured twin-sets and plaid skirts, was fond of telling us that God loved us so much he could number the hairs on our heads (a fairly pointless activity, in my estimation). “But didn't he love those children and their parents enough to spare them the concentration camps?” I asked. She clearly wasn't prepared to answer questions like that. God seemed like a grand deception that grown-ups practised on children, and I thought that even if there was a god, he clearly didn't have his priorities in order.

The hospital chapel was peaceful, though, and I even wrote a small prayer, or more like a wish, into the book on the altar.
Let his passing be painless and graceful
, I wrote. I put his initials and my own.

Leaving the chapel, I was surprised to see a small building I recognized from
Exploring Victoria's Architecture
. I knew at once it was the Pemberton Memorial Operating Theatre, built in 1896. Large windows provided light for surgical operations, which were performed in the middle of the room. It's built of brick, with a hipped roof, and topped with a lantern ventilator. The lines are very gracious, somehow, speaking of earlier days, and I was delighted to learn that it was currently being restored and will remain a small historical presence near the chapel, in the midst of a very busy city hospital.

For me, the operating theatre was a reminder of several things — the changing face of the city where I'd spent most of my childhood, most specifically its scale (this diminutive building in the shadow of the huge hospital complex surrounding it); the idea that the past is always available to us though often not in the form that we expect it to be; that principles of design have changed to reflect population shifts (towers to accommodate the services a hospital is required to provide from childbirth to the laying out of corpses).

Being at the Royal Jubilee over those days reminded me that I'd been born in that hospital, though not of course in the Pemberton Memorial Operating Theatre. In the hospital's gift shop, I saw a photograph of the operating theatre in use in 1906. Four nurses and a doctor (and I think I'm correct in assigning these roles based on gender, given the time and the nature of those occupations) lean over a sheet-covered patient in the centre of the room. The generous windows are uncurtained, and a few flimsy electrical lighting fixtures hang from the ceiling, one of them positioned over the patient. Basins and large enamel jugs covered with cloth wait on an adjacent table while one nurse holds a jug at the ready where the doctor is operating on the patient. The table behind the team has an array of instruments on cloth; everything orderly and bright. All of this attests to the theatre's commitment to British physician and medical activist Dr. Joseph Lister's belief in the importance of antisepsis in surgical procedures; a room attached on the north side was intended for sterilization. The operating theatre's main proponent, Dr. John Chapman Davie Jr., was a keen advocate of Dr. Lister's methodologies and insisted on a space that would facilitate their practical application.

It was after leaving my father on one of my final visits that my husband and I drove off on the little trip that took us through Osoyoos and Greenwood. I had so many disparate and confusing emotions; among them the sense that we were driving deep into the interior of my relationship with my father, and his with his father, and that coloured the next few days. What I wanted to know was: what shaped my father? Who shaped him?

There is one photograph of my father with his parents. For years, it sat on a shelf in an unused room in the basement of my parents' home in Victoria. Now that the house is sold and they live in an apartment, I wonder where the photograph ended up. Perhaps in one of the three storage lockers they have for the stuff they couldn't bring themselves to sort or give away when they moved. I remember asking at one point if I could take the photograph home with me. I imagined cleaning the grimy wooden frame, polishing the glass, and hanging it in my study, though the group is so grim that the prospect of them watching me work at my desk is a little off-putting. In any case, my request was greeted with startled consternation: “That's one of the only pictures I have of my old parents.”

“I just thought that as it was put away in that downstairs room that you might be willing to pass it along to me. It really needs a good cleaning and I'd like to take it home and hang it in my study.”

“It's not yours. It's mine. They're my parents. When I want you to have it, I'll let you know.”

In the photograph, my grandparents bracket my father, who must be standing on a stool because his head is at the same level as theirs. My father looks to be about three years of age. My grandmother was born in 1883, and my father in 1926, so that makes her about forty-three. She had given birth to at least ten children, two of whom died in early childhood — and she had buried one husband. I say “at least” because although I'd been awake in the night counting the children I remembered on my fingers — and coming up with eight who lived into adulthood and the two who died — there might be one or two I've forgotten. We weren't close to them, although most summers we drove to Alberta and participated in a large celebratory meal or gathering at the lake cottage of the more prosperous family members.

The photograph of my father and his parents is hand-coloured, and poorly at that. No one is actually smiling, though my grandmother might have the tiny beginnings of one. My father is looking slightly to one side, towards his mother. He's wearing the same shirt or suit he's wearing in another photograph, equally neglected, but that one is truly strange.

In the second photograph, my father stands in his white shirt, short pants, dark stockings, and boots on a rattan chair. Someone has told him to stand still, because there is nothing natural about his pose. But — and here's the bizarre thing — hovering in the air, as though balanced on the arm of the chair, is the swaddled form of his sister Julia, who died three years before he was born. This is the late 1920s, before Photoshop — before any of the techniques we are now so accustomed to using. I know that photographers could manipulate images even in the nineteenth century (I think of Hannah Maynard in Victoria with her trick portraits and artistic interpretations). But this is clearly the work of someone who didn't have much skill at all. The half of the photograph into which baby Julia has been inserted is blurry.

That only this one photograph survives suggests that although money was probably in short supply, my grandparents wanted a record of the two children they had conceived together. Perhaps they were more sentimental than I've been led to believe, because what other reason would result in an image of a baby being inserted into the photograph of her brother-to-be, at least five years after her death? Julia was nearly three when she died, and yet the photograph is of an infant, wrapped in a blanket, wearing a hat against the cold.

Photographs are intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying. I've tried to read these ones for hidden narratives of love and family connection and perhaps I've interpreted them completely incorrectly. Still, sometimes photographs with their cryptic stories and forgotten conclusions are all we have.

In Osoyoos, I took advantage of the hotel's wireless Internet connection (at home we just have access to very slow dial-up) to find Web sites devoted to Bukovina. I loved the YouTube offering of Orthodox monks chanting psalms in Putna, a beautiful painted monastery that I know about from a book,
Sweet Bucovina
, by Ion Miclea, given my son years earlier by a Romanian classmate of his. There was also footage of the monks painting ikons, walking in forests, involved in daily monastic activities.

Having just come from a few days with my dad, and the Pemberton Memorial Operating Theatre, I was haunted by a certain familiarity in some of the chapels and buildings of the monasteries. At Putna, for example, the small tower seems to have the same hexagonal shape as the Pemberton operating theatre. The churches of Humor and Voronet — these buildings have reverberations, though of course they come from different cultures, continents, languages, and a different religious tradition. Maybe I wanted the solace of spirituality, in whatever shape it came — medical, Orthodox, polished wood, hymnals tucked behind pews. I heard the faintest echoes of liturgy, of buildings on opposite sides of the world, and they form a coherence in my heart, if not my mind.

The Pemberton whose estate funded the operating theatre was Joseph Despard Pemberton, a surveyor who was instrumental in laying out townsites in nineteenth-century British Columbia. Born in Ireland, he came to work for the Hudson's Bay Company and was involved in colonial, then provincial politics in Victoria, before founding a prominent real estate company prior to his death in 1893. His widow donated the funding for the chapel where I'd left a prayer or wish for my father's peaceful passing. When I returned to the chapel, I heard those Orthodox monks from YouTube as though they were in the room, their psalms available in the strange way that music sometimes is, across centuries, through time zones, generations, the airwaves holding and cradling the notes until they are released to the needy — believers
in extremis
, or women whose fathers are dying.

On my next visit to my father in Victoria, two weeks after the trip to Osoyoos, walking the corridor to 3C, I looked out to see the operating theatre stripped of its paint, the old brick and mortar exposed. The boards had been removed from the windows, which were elegant. The roof had been cleaned and restored. It was so beautiful that I stopped in my tracks, reminding my daughter to lend me her camera next day so I could photograph the building in its antique glory.