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History, when you have not lived it, feels like a dream; imagination fills in the spaces. Hearing the lines in a play that we "think back through our mothers," I weep with a sudden, sharp sense of loss, not only for my own mother, who died young, but also with sorrow and longing for my Polish grandmother, who was part of my life for much longer. To think back through her past, to seek and discover the origin of some of my own qualities, I find the slender thread of what I know of my baba's history and follow it, dreamlike, to 1929, when Helena Lis Bodlak came to the newest place on earth.
Or so it must have seemed as she walked from the ship to rejoin her husband, who arrived one year before and travelled by train to work on farms across the steadfast Canadian prairie. She must have felt like an insect frozen in the amber of her country -- smoothness hardened around her like a translucent shell -- preserving the memories, the language, those jigging, impossible consonants, the liquid vowels. I remember how she spoke of "the old country" as though forbidden to say its name, as if it was fashionable to leave it behind, as if she could possess it like a lace hankie, tucked inside her handbag with tokens for the streetcar.
I study their wedding picture: a serious bride, a kerchiefed sister, men with moustaches and barefoot children. Strong cheekbones. I imagine dancing, plentiful dishes of home-cooked food, flowers, kisses and many tears. She left those people behind, and -- the simple truth of this injures me -- she would not see most of them again.
Immigrating to Canada
I cannot imagine leaving my family that completely, with so much uncertainty filling the vast space between us. I open a box that once rested in the back of Baba's dresser drawer and take out documents and pictures. In her passport photograph she is unbearably beautiful, her expression serene. She wears pearls and a small brooch clasped at the neck of her cotton dress. Stamped in Danzig, Poland, on June 28, 1929, much of the inky scrawl and official printed Polish on its faded pages I cannot understand. In a testimony of her baptism, Latin proclaims her parents Andreas and Eva agricolae, farmers in Bachorz, Poland. Polska, the "land of fields."
Helena Lis, one of nine children, all of them now gone. A purple vaccination card, dark as a bruise, is marked by a medical officer in Danzig. I turn the card over in my hand; its rich colour reminds me of a flower with velvety petals. She, too, held this, more than 70 years ago in a faraway port. A Dominion of Canada naturalization certificate from 1935 declares Helena a housewife born in 1901; her husband, a labourer. She stands five foot three with a fair complexion, light brown hair and blue eyes. People tell me I look like her.
Under "Visible Distinguishing Marks" it reads None, but this is wrong. They should have seen and recorded her strength and bravery. My dream of Baba's history shifts to mid-July 1929. The passage from Danzig to the immigration office in Quebec has taken almost three weeks. It is hot, and Helena is tired, her mind and limbs still swaying with the movement of the waves. She hasn't seen her new husband for almost a year. She tries to read the faces of the uniformed officials; they are suspicious, bored. She doesn't understand most of what they tell her, but waits there with hundreds of others; a little boy cries somewhere in line. One year from now, in Vancouver, she will give birth to her own son. He will be named Stanisław, and one day he will become my father. But Helena doesn't know any of this as she waits forever in this musty office -- for her, it is the dream to come.
I put these papers back with the photographs. Some of the documents are crinkled, their folds stiff; others are worn soft like old currency. Their mustiness smells lovely, and I breathe it in. She kept these. She kept them for me.
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