string quartet, op. 135, the one Beethoven finished the year before he died. I chose its fourth movement to be performed at Okuma-san’s funeral, and now, it is perfect for this day, the notes floating to the highest peaks. I left this valley fifty-one years ago on a bus with Okuma-san, and now, I listen to the music he loved. There is a delicacy to this quartet, a reminder of contrasts, of opposites, the more so while I’m surrounded by the majesty of the mountains. Everything comes together. Perhaps everything Beethoven knew. Maybe he had some grand vision of humanity.
IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1967, I was about to move to London, England, on a scholarship. I had finished a degree in fine arts several years earlier and had been living in a small apartment in downtown Montreal. I was painting, and sharing the apartment with an artist named Peter. We had become friends, and we both had part-time jobs. I worked at an antiquarian bookstore west of Atwater during the day, and attended classes at the Museum of Fine Arts in the evenings. Peter worked for a private gallery on Sherbrooke Street and attended the same classes. Each of us had submitted a painting to the jury for the museum’s spring exhibition, and we were ecstatic to learn that our work had been selected. It was the final exhibition of that type, and it was my first painting to be accepted for a large exhibit. It was also the year of Expo 67, when the world came to Montreal. Every chance I had, I took the Metro to the Expo site and visited the gallery, the outdoor works by Giacometti and Henry Moore, the photography exhibit, the many splendid pavilions. Everything seemed possible that year.
In August, I travelled by train to Ottawa to spend a week with Okuma-san before departing for London. He had made a life for himself in Ottawa. It was a quiet place, and it suited him. Although he had retired from teaching two years earlier, he had remained active in the music world. He had bought a piano and he played for himself, but not publicly. The pain in his left hand had worsened over the years and he suffered from arthritis. But he listened to music constantly and he had become known as a Beethoven expert. He gave talks and lectures and wrote program notes and published a number of important papers. I had met most of his friends. They attended concerts together and performed, and some were members of the church Okuma-san attended in the west end of the city.
He had also accomplished what he had set out to do: he had ensured that I completed my formal education; he had sent me to university; he had helped me to begin the exhilarating study of art. He had provided me with a home, and he had supported me in every way.
The week I spent with Okuma-san was the last week of his life, though I did not know this at the time. He had a friend, Mari, and the three of us ate most of our meals together. Mari was a widow, and she and Okuma-san spent much of their time in each other’s company. During that week, he and I walked the pathways along the Ottawa River, talking, discussing music and art. He was curious to hear about my latest enthusiasms. He also wanted me to visit Paris, Florence, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Amsterdam, the great cities of Europe. He spoke about the birthplace of Beethoven in Bonn, the life mask, the ear trumpets, the grandfather clock, the four-stringed piano, all of which I would later see for myself. I had saved as much money as I could towards travel expenses, and Peter had found a McGill student named Lena to take over my room in Montreal during the year I would be away. I did not meet Lena before I left the country, but Peter told me she was a history major, a Montrealer who wanted to move out of her parents’ home so that she would be closer to the campus.
Two days after I said goodbye to Okuma-san in Ottawa, I was in Montreal, packing my belongings in a trunk that was to be left behind with Peter. The phone rang and it was Mari. Okuma-san had died suddenly, from a heart attack. I was on a train, returning to Ottawa, within hours of the call.
At the funeral, I sat beside Mari, who had arranged for the musicians—all friends of Okuma-san—to play the last movement of the String Quartet in F major. It was performed expertly, the grace and power of Beethoven flowing into every sorrowful space inside the church. From the oak pew, I thought about the grace and power that had also been Okuma-san’s. He had met adversity with stoicism and with hope. He had set the example of never giving in to anger, even though he knew I had anger of my own inside me. He had provided strength in my background, and I had relied upon him for stability, for support and for love.
As I sat there, I could not help but think of the shack in the camp, with its brittle needles of frost inside the ceiling and walls, the worn plank keyboard of ponderosa pine, the bruised hands, the attempts at the sonata, the cream-coloured paper he had slit from his best books so that I would be able to draw, the lone egg in the refrigerator, the first time I heard a recording of the Emperor Concerto and how we listened to it twice in the same evening in the fading light of the chicken coop. I wondered, too, if the plank keyboard even existed. We had left it in the chicken coop the day we departed British Columbia, and it might be there still. I doubted that any other tenant lived in that place after we left in 1951.
I thought of all the parts of our lives that Okuma-san and I had shared as father and son, for twenty-one years. And I was grateful.
After the funeral, Mari gave me an envelope that had been found with Okuma-san’s papers and his will. Whatever he owned had been left to me. I opened the envelope later, when I was alone, after the mourners had departed, after the
The music has ended; the road widens. I am able to loosen my grip on the steering wheel as the car descends into the valley. I park at the side of what, surprisingly, is now a paved road. Why should this come as a surprise? It’s been more than half a century since I lived here.
Basil clambers out and we stand together and face the camp. Or what would have been the camp. But could sixty-one shacks have fit into this narrow space? I walk forward into the field where the huge tents were set up the fourth day after our arrival by train. At first, this is confusing, and I wonder if I can be in the right place.
Any structure we left behind has been razed to the ground. The field is run through with weeds and shrubs grown wild. There are bushes with red berries I don’t remember, and sagebrush and tumbleweed at the edges of the field. The slopes hold only a thin layer of trees. The ground is lumpy, but when I look more closely I see outlines of scooped-out places, now covered with tufted grass. And there’s the town, on the other side of the river. This has to be the camp. But the winds of fifty years have swept through and it has become a barren place.
I stand still and try to gather memory. Recognition comes slowly. My eyes follow contours and outlines on the surface of the field. I open a mental map and unfold it, square by careful square.
And now that my eyes have adjusted, I see tarpaper fragments, a shallow indent hardly more than six feet square. I pick up a stick that fits to my palm, and use it to dig. And suddenly I’m unearthing a half century’s drifting silt. The end of the stick hits something that clinks, and I keep digging. Pieces of china now, and some heavier Japanese porcelain. A blue-and-white rice bowl that matches the one I saw in First Father’s kitchen last night. This one is whole except for a large triangular chip missing from the rim. Miraculously, I find the chip as well, and I stow both pieces to take back with me.
This is the place. The buried place. With no trace of path worn smooth between three rows of shacks; no trace of bathhouse, outhouse, schoolhouse. No trace of Jack-pine pole, of water tank, of woodshed where a headless bear once hung upside down. No sign that a community endured, that Auntie Aya gave birth, that Baby
