The Mazovia Legacy Read Online Free PDF

return. I wanted to tell you there is something, so you would know as soon as you get back.” But what? What did you want to say so badly that you could not have waited until I get back? Why did you not just say what it was?
    â€œI have been worrying about some important matters these past months and you yourself remarked on this, I know, before you left.” Yes, poor Uncle, yes, you did seem worried about something and I didn’t insist enough that you tell me what it was. I was too busy thinking about the worries of others rather than of you.
    â€œSo perhaps we could speak just as soon as you get in, please, if that is all right. Could you call me immediately?” He never would say I should call him immediately. Never. That is a word for emergencies .
    â€œThere are matters you should now perhaps know a little about.” What matters? What? What secrets did his heart hold after all those years of life? she wondered . What are these things that I should know a little about? How seldom did I ask him to tell me his story.
    And then there was the most distressing part of all, the part that pierced her to the depths of her soul.
    â€œAnd, yes, I should also say, even though you know this, that I love you very much, Natalia, my dear. But you know that, I suppose. I do hope I have never hurt you with my foolish bad temper or my old-fashioned way.” Poor, poor old man, she thought. Poor dear old man. Alone, and speaking into machines instead of to someone he loved and could trust.
    â€œSo good-bye, darling. Stanislaw.” Good-bye, darling Stanislaw. Good-bye.
    *
    The funeral helped her to say good-bye, but the scene itself was full of sorrow and metaphors of sorrow. No funeral in Montreal in midwinter can ever be anything else. The light on the snow was brilliant, but the trees were black and leafless. Lifeless. The headstones at Côte des Neiges Cemetery were dark and the roadways were dark and the coats and hats of the people were dark. And it was very, very cold.
    Puffs of frozen breath came from the mouths of the few mourners who attended. Most of them were from the CBC, some neighbours, and a few old émigré faces she did not readily recognize. The earth from the frozen gravesite had come away in rock-hard brown and black clods, and these were piled beside the black rectangle in the snow where her uncle’s body was to go.
    The priest, in black cassock and overcoat and a pair of black rubber boots that showed below the hems, said the service in French. After the coffin had been lowered, it was impossible to find a few loose grains of earth to toss into the grave, and no one wanted to throw frozen clods noisily against the coffin lid. This is not done at midwinter funerals in Montreal. So the few mourners walked with some difficulty through the snow in their dress-up shoes and boots and stood beside the black cars idling on the roadway. Great plumes of steam trailed out behind the limousines into the clear cold air.
    Natalia had said good-bye to Stanislaw at the funeral, had been glad of the ritual, but she had not said good-bye to her growing certainty that there was more to this death than anyone might ever know.
    Some days after the funeral, she had a dream that confirmed this to her in the way only a Jungian and an introvert can accept that an intuition is correct. It was this dream that convinced her that she must take steps to discover the truth of the matter, the daylight truth as well as the psychic truth.
    She is running alone in a snow-covered field somewhere in rural Quebec. She is not sure whether she is running urgently to find something or running away from some danger. It is possibly both at once, as is the case in dreams of this nature. The sky is grey, the snow is wet and deep, and the scene is colourless, black and white, as winter days in Quebec can appear to be. She reaches the exact centre of the field and the centre is marked formally, symbolically, by a small rock