Inner Legacy

Inner Legacy

Douglas Stuart

Copyright Douglas Stuart 2012

Published by Kafkasworld

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A death in the family

The red match head is scraped down the rough edge of the matchbox and jumps into flame. The darkness recedes. I can see well enough now to select my taper and light it making sure it has caught the flame before I blow gently on the match to extinguish the flame.

I light my votive candles one by one and they flicker into life within their red glass containers. The room brightens and the icon of Our Lady becomes visible, the flickering light turning the gold into a fire that animates the icon. I cross myself slowly and then kneel down on the hassock before my little altar.

The oratory is quiet with the stillness of night. I sit back on my heels for a period of remembrance before I embark on my night prayer. The Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, runs through my mind in rhythm with my breathing. It is a given constant in my life and while my mind recites it I am also free to meditate and remember.

Tonight I will pray for the soul of my Grandfather. I do this annually on the anniversary of his death.

When my period of remembrance is over I open the book on my little altar and take out his photograph and place it under the icon of Our Lady and begin my prayers for his soul.

***

Monday morning is grey and misty, the ground damp, the street lights reflect on the damp darkness of tarmac, it is November and milder than I would have expected for the time of year. I would normally be longing for the first sign of snow and the sharp frosts that  seem to give fresh clean beauty to everything they touch, however on this day I am glad the weather has remained mild for I have miles to go and less time than I would like.

Late last evening my sister phoned and as she talked my heart grew heavy with the expectation of grief. In an hour or so she would appear at my door and together we would make the journey to my Mother's house where my Grandmother was being cared for by my parents. Death was approaching and so we had been advised to make haste if we wanted to spend a few days with her before the end.

As I waited, I made and drank coffee, showered, shaved and packed a bag. At the given hour I was standing ready outside my front door waiting for my sister.

We drove in silence, each lost in our own thoughts and memories. A silence that spoke of our deep love for our Grandmother and the pain of knowing this would be the time to say goodbye. Just after lunch time we arrived and were met at the door by my Father who indicated we should head for the kitchen and in a low voice told us that my Grandmother had just fallen asleep.

We made our way quietly into the kitchen and as the door closed behind us my Mother turned from the cooker where she was stirring soup and tears were running down her face. We hugged one another and over a bowl of soup talked in subdued voices.

***

The next week passed slowly, my Grandmother, alternating between periods of lucidity and sleep. We all grew very close and shared memories as well as tears, hugs and cups of tea. My Mother kept herself busy with the necessary chores of a final illness. Washing, cooking, caring, hovering around the bed, wiping a brow, holding a hand, whispering quiet words. Hour by hour we sat by the bedside, taking breaks for naps, fresh air and the gathering of strength. The pain we felt was emotional, my Grandmother floated between this world and the next, any pain she might feel dulled by a morphine pump. Nurses came and went. We waited.

A second week began but there would not be third. Unable to eat or drink, before our eyes she faded, drawing her last faint breath in the middle of a rainy afternoon.

Arrangements were made, prayers offered, candles lit. Time hung heavily with the end of caring, the hours lengthening as we waited for the funeral.

Later, after, when silence returned, I stayed to help clear her room and deal with practicalities.

While parting with clothes and other personal items was difficult it was no worse than expected and laughter broke through more than once with a lessening sense of guilt each time. Voices too returned slowly to normal. Life moved slowly on, periods of normality increased.

The final item to be cleared was a small case containing personal items and documents, photos and a little box tied up with string with a label written in my Grandfather's hand, that bore my name. This created a mild stir when we discovered it as it was unfamiliar to us all.

In the dining room we had to resort to scissors to release the string and open the box. Inside were twelve identical small blue notebooks. I opened the first with great expectation only to puzzled, confused, disappointed by the contents. My parents shook their heads. 

It was a few minutes later we began to recall, as we sipped our tea, we had seen these notebooks before. My Grandfather fell ill, given no more than six months to live, and a notebook was immediately always to hand. He wrote in them furtively, the contents hidden from our eyes. A few days before his death he had stopped writing. The books disappeared and were forgotten.

We looked at them again, fingering them carefully, turning each page in an effort to make sense of what was before us; numbers, nothing but numbers. Page after page of rows of numbers, in a tiny neat script.

***

A few days later I returned home. After stress and company I was glad to at last to be alone, happy to have returned to a place where silence reigned supreme. I placed the notebooks in the top left hand drawer of the bureau in my study. I was puzzled by them but was convinced they must mean something.

I stood for long time looking out at the wintry rain, lost in thought.

Lighting the fire as darkness fell I sat down in my favourite chair. I opened the book I had taken from my library. I stroked its cover with affection, the title marked in relief, "A Life in Themes" my Grandfather's privately published memoir. The book was designed as family record of his life, for those who were interested in such things and wanted to be able to ask questions of older or deceased relatives. He had tried to anticipate every question that might be asked by those expressing curiosity about family history. It was also a vehicle for passing on his thoughts on a number of subjects including several essays on subjects close to his heart.

I valued the book greatly. It created a bond across the void but more than that I was fascinated by many of his ideas.

My Grandfather was a cleric, without ambition, for him life was about studying. He was never happier then when surrounded by books, he found them easier to deal with than people. Until his late twenties he spent almost all of his time at University, completing science and divinity degrees. His interests were wide and varied from history and theology to maths, physics and cosmology. In religion he tended towards the mystical and knew writings of the Desert Fathers intimately.

Like his opinions on how we should read books ( backwards and right to left ) he had some odd ideas about the nature of time. He believed that all time existed at once and we were no more than ants moving along a giant ruler which if seen from above would allow us a view of the totality of time. He called this the God view of time. More than that he speculated that time didn't really exist and our experience of it was purely subjective.

Seemingly contrary to this he explained in his memoir that he viewed time as the flow of genetic material through generations. His desire in his memoir was to pass on more than a genetic inheritance.

He talked in his memoir about cosmological theories of multiversity and explored what that might mean for us, for religion and history.

***

Over the next few weeks I glanced from time to time at the notebooks willing them to make sense. I confess a sense of frustration grew in me. I longed for them to make sense, to find some kind of key to understanding them. The alternative was for the moment too dreadful to contemplate. They could be just as they seemed, rows of meaningless numbers, in which case it meant that my Grandfather was in the final months of his life no longer in touch with reality. While such a thought did enter my mind and brought with it a sense of sadness it could be brushed aside with relative ease, my Grandfather had remained lucid to the end. If the notebooks were not meaningless then there had to be key to access them. A key I was missing.

I phoned my friend Emma.

Emma, petite, black hair bobbed and with an engagingly wide smile and a razor sharp mind agreed willingly to  take a look at the notebooks. I was exceptionally fond of Emma. I looked forward to the pleasure of her company the following day.

The Code

"Look!" she said,  showing me the notebook and pointed to the first line.

"1,2,3,4,5,26."

"So?", I said?

"Look at this sequence," and she laid the notebooks out on the table.

"1-1,2,3,4,5,26. and the next 2-1,2,3,4,5,26. and on up to 11-1,2,3,4,5,26.

It's code he said a simple numerical code."

I looked at her bemused.

"Code?"

Emma explained patiently about ciphers and cryptography and described various methods used to hide words within a code, from one time only ciphers to even more complex methods. After a while I offered to make us coffee and disappeared to the kitchen leaving her with her head buried in the notebooks.

When I came back from the kitchen she had paper from my study spread out before her and was writing.

"As far as I can see the code is given in the those first few lines in each book. "I think" she mused, "that it is a very simple, meant to be broken easily, code. He was giving the key."

Puzzled I looked at the paper she was working on. It seemed to me to be a jumble of letters and numbers.

Indicating I should sit close to her she began to explain.

"The first line in each book has 1,2,3,4,5,26 and  after the first book there is a numeral at the beginning like 1-1,2,3,4,5,26."

She looked up to check that I was following, seeing some puzzlement on my face she said,"How many books do we have here?"-

"Twelve." I said.

"Doesn't that match then?"

I saw clearly at that moment what she was leading up to, the books were ordered from zero to eleven giving twelve in total.

"I think it works like this he has substituted numbers for letters where A=1 B= 2 C=3 and Z=26 and he has given the key to reading the books in the right order."

I sat back.

We sipped our coffee and I wondered why my Grandfather would have done  such a thing.

We noticed as we studied the first book that groups of numbers were separated not only by commas but  also by a forward slash.

Emma wrote the first lot of numbers before the slash out on paper. At the top she laid out the alphabet and  below it the corresponding numbers so that we could easily decode the numbers.

14113,185135132518,81523,9,19194,215151119,1981521124,25,18514/

"There is a fair chance the commas indicate words." smiled Emma, and began to work on the first group of numbers.

14113

Taking them as single digits she came up with ADAAC which made no sense. Trying out various possibilities and trying to work out what groupings they might be for example 1,4,11,3 or 14,11,3, she produced various nonsense words,  NAAC, NLC, ADKC, when she tried 1,4,1,13 she struck gold and there was my name.

Adam.

I was startled. .........

Emma laughed lightly and pointed out that we could fairly easily make sense of the rest.

Adam,185135132518,81523,9,19194,215151119,1981521124,25,18514/

She pointed out the pattern indicating that the  9 must be I and 25  would be either Y or BE. Writing down the code  we now had : Adam,185135132518,81523,I,19194,215151119,1981521124,Be,18514/

She carried on working and by now I could see it was like a puzzle that needed to be solved by trial and error like a complex Sudoku puzzle. Together now we worked on tackling the shorter words first.

It unfolded for us like this.

Adam, 185135132518,81523,I,19194,215151119,1981521124,Be,Read/

Adam, 185135132518,81523,I,Said,215151119,1981521124,Be,Read/

Until we came up with :

Adam remember how I said books should read.

Emma asked if this meant something to me. I hesitated, it was a very clear to me what it meant, she took that hesitation to mean it didn't and I let her think so. I was uncomfortable now. It is difficult to say why I demurred at that point. If I was correct the next word she tried would make no sense,

She did start on the next word and puzzled over it giving me time to gather my thoughts. At last I explained my thoughts and feelings about it to her and to my relief she seemed to understand my concerns. The next word could not be decoded as I thought and I explained that my Grandfather has frequently told me that in his opinion books should be read in the opposite direction from back to front and right to left. Being left handed he often said the world would be back to front if only left handed people had been the majority.