Marrow Memory

Jack and Luke wade through the tangled shrubs, careful not to tread on the sunken graves of the Old Brusno cemetery. Sandstone crosses appear within the underbrush, weather-beaten. Pale angels and ashen, sad-faced Madonnas peek between the tree trunks, haloed with blossoms of reddish-orange moss. Footed in the greenery of the underbrush, they seem to float. A world secreted in the deep shadows of an old-growth beech forest in the southeastern corner of Poland.

From the time our plane took off from Toronto Pearson International Airport five days earlier, my sons had complained incessantly: about thebigos they would not touch (they gag at the smell of sauerkraut, the fragrance of my childhood); about my speaking Polish to them (“Excuse me, but I know what language I’m speaking.”; “Not here, you don’t.”); about the lousy cellphone coverage. Whenever I try to shoot a photo of either of them, they pull faces or swat me away. On the first leg of a month-long tour of my homeland, we are visiting Horyniec, a town on the Polish-Ukrainian border where my grandmother was born in 1917.

“Not another cemetery,” ten-year-old Luke moaned when I told them where we were going this morning.

Jack scowled as only a teenager can: “You’re crazy, Mama.”

Perhaps I am. I was bitten by a genealogy bug when, on a microfilm at the Hamilton Family History Library, I located my grandfather’s name in the 1908 baptism book from the now extinct Polish parish in Toporów. At that moment, I saw my grandfather – a tall, sinewy carpenter who had given me rides on his broad shoulders during Sunday walks – as a helpless, two-day-old newborn held over the baptismal font by his godparents. The distances and borders between me and that moment – the ninety-four years, the thousands of kilometres over two continents and one ocean, the three official languages: Polish, Latin and English – disappeared. An unbroken chain led from that newborn to the newborn Luke I had recently brought home. From then on, I dug deeper, further into the past. It was not only the thrill of adding new names to the family tree that drove the search. Something more powerful, something unnameable tugged at me across the chasms of time.

I had wanted to visit this cemetery from the second its photograph appeared on my computer screen nine years earlier, white crosses glowing among the misty green beeches. At the time, I had hit a brick wall in my genealogical research: my mother had no idea where her mother, my maternal grandmother, was born. My grandmother had died when my mother was eight and the fragile chain of memories had broken. As far as I knew, all my ancestors were peasants, and, unlike nobility, their family trees have very shallow roots: serfs were too busy struggling to survive to pay attention to their family history. My mother’s ancestors had lived