I knew a man who was born in a peasant village in Galicia, close to the Polish border. By the time he was nineteen he had worked his way to Vladivostok and then to Siberia. "Up there," he said, "the snow got deep. Men stole food, and then one man killed another and the police locked the murderer in a cage with the corpse. The starving man went so crazy he ate his dead man before he died, too. The police left the cage in the forest. In the spring, when the trees were in flower, birds built nests in the bones."

He came home to his village and worked as a stable hand. He thought he might join the army but then he saw a small poster, a handbill that said: COME TO SASKATCHEWAN. He told me: "Because I didn’t know where it was, I went."

He sailed for Canada.

He worked on the prairies and for a while he lived with four other farm labourers in a one-room boorday, a sod hut, half-underground.

"It was strange," he said, "it was like living together in your own grave."

At the same time, a young Ukrainian girl arrived by boat in Montreal. In her home village, an old priest had made her sister pregnant. She thought he was going to make her pregnant, too. She had come to Montreal to marry a shoemaker. It was an arranged marriage. The shoemaker wasn’t there. He didn’t show up. Someone took her from the docks and gave her a bag of sandwiches and put her on a train for Saskatchewan.

Five days alone by train, two thousand miles.

A girl who couldn’t speak English.

The Galician was working there on a farm.

She went to work on the same farm.

He heard his boss sing:

They came to Toronto, got married and had a daughter.

"We made a nest," he said.

He was a man of stamina, of stoic courage. He worked as a plumber. He pressed pants. He set pins in bowling alleys. He was a barber. He laid cobblestones between the city streetcar tracks.

He saved his money and bought a small house.

Then, he got sick, a terrible arthritis in his spine. Doctors fused his vertebrae together to ease the pain.

He couldn’t turn his head.

"It doesn’t matter," he said, "I never look back."

Over the next forty years, in pain, he often could not work. He had to stay home, sitting upright in his chair, and he read books, novels in Russian ordered by surface mail from Moscow, a people’s press, newsprint pages and cardboard covers.

He said he liked Tolstoy. He felt Tolstoy was talking music to him. He didn’t like Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was just talking, talking.

His wife kept a cat, and kept a canary in a cage. It made her smile, watching the cat watch the bird. She was amused by the steadfast stillness of the cat’s yearning. She was pleased by the bird’s chirping. She talked to the bird.

The daughter got married.

In the year his daughter gave him a grandson, two of his farm labour friends from the old country who had lived with him in the sod hut in Saskatchewan died.

Their names were in the local Ukrainian newspaper.

His wife had cataracts in her eyes so he read the death notices aloud to his wife.

She was strong but she could hardly see and didn’t realize that she had left the canary cage door open. The bird flew around the house and then out the back door.

"A bird flying in the house," he said, "means death."

But he grew older and older.

He also grew feeble and hardly slept.

A deeper pain had nested in his bones as he sat upright staring straight ahead.

"I know how to do a hundred things," he said, "but I don’t know how to die."

Two weeks later, he died, though he still didn’t know how to die because he died in his sleep.

He had almost never talked about his life. He had never looked back. He certainly didn’t know how to tell his story.

So, I have told his story, and the story is how he will be remembered.