I. The Pictures in Broken Mirrors and the History of Monuments

His stories always fascinated me, perhaps because they were tinged with a history that I would never know, or maybe because they painted such a vivid picture of him that was otherwise unseen. He would light up when he told them. He would grin from ear to ear, which always struck me with a mixture of glee and melancholy. Gleeful, because he was almost another person when he would tell his stories, so full of life, moving through the dullness of the now to the excitement of the past. Melancholy, because in opposition to this, I often thought the stories themselves were rather tragic. I think they were funny to him now. At one point, I believe my grandfather ran out of anger and tears to give. Time exhausted him and transformed him.

My family spoke of him in ways that I could not fathom when he told me his stories. Laughter would escape his mouth on the edge of every word, yet my grandmother and father recall his solemn and stone demeanor in decades past. He was blunt, to the point, and could not see much value in anyone if they were not able to take care of themselves. Laughter was not something he found useful or would waste his time on.

I did not find this to be my experience. My grandfather was a solemn man indeed, but he would always find a way to make me laugh or exploit my childish curiosities. As I grew older I began to view him as a dichotomy. The oppositions between his past and his present, his whimsy and his bleakness, what he would tell me of himself and what others would tell me of him. After years of his stories, spanning decades, portraiting the lands of Bosnia, Austria, Germany, and Canada, I began to realize he was not a dichotomy. He was fractured. Fractured by himself, his family, and his friends. Like a reflection in a broken mirror, an image is there, thought certain parts are hard to discern. In one sense it is whole, but this wholeness is intimately attached to obscurity.

I wanted to delve into these cracks, to fill them, to make my imaginings clear. I had so many rifts in my mind about him, the man he was and the man he became. I would imagine him as a statue, an ancient monument of sorts. Pristine and holy at its inception to the people who built it. As years passed this statue would see many things but remain as it is. As these years built into centuries, millenniums, and so on the statue would become weathered. Tiny fractures would evolve into huge gulfs, the image would have change but fundamentally stay the same. The passage of time makes the statue tired, and part of it gives way. It takes on new meanings for people, it is not seen in the way it was before, but people do not forget its past manifests of significance. The passage of time beckons a kaleidoscopic sense of memory and vision of the monument. We desire to make it whole, to have its story fully told so we may understand how it has changed and evolved. But, as with so many monuments of our past, we are only able to see so much, hear so many stories, and feel so many textures. We strive to find something that may not be found on the whims of our own wonderment and the urges of our own understanding. It is not the comfort of knowing, but the comfort in that we push ourselves to know.

I realized that every story I heard was in itself a push. The tales he told and the way he told them fed my need to fill in the fractures. It is odd to think that you cannot simply ask one so close to you by blood the simple question of “who are you?” We must instead piece it together. I have grappled for many years with the bits and pieces of all his stories. Their content, their meaning, their nostalgia, their emotion, their reality, their fiction, and their paradoxes.

I may never know how accurate the stories were, much less no my interpretation of them; but in the end they do fill my need for clarity of vision and ideation of my grandfather, the monument in a broken mirror.