The Stone-Father

1. So the story goes that the Elena Kazoglou and her children fled their home in time to avoid a massacre, and ran towards the south-east. Where initially the enemy, the boys of Shurikoi, were close on their heels to kill any Permyaks who had escaped their ambush, the journey then evolved into a fleeing towards, more than a fleeing from; for Elena was so possessed by the belief that a place of refuge lay beyond the three Griadas, three mountain ranges separating the north and south of the country. 

The daughter, Chrysanthi, developed at this time a habit of picking up random trinkets from the ground, carrying them for a distance, studying them with an odd intensity, then discarding them; this she did until settling on a long, flat piece of shale from a dry river bed which they passed in the summer. Chrysanthi did not throw away the shale after a few days, like the usual, but seemed to have developed an emotional attachment to it. She did not mind that the weight added to the difficulty of her trip. Whenever they found a place to rest for the night, she set up the stone next to her mother before falling asleep murmuring beside it. 

When Nikolaus asked her about her curious practice, she replied: This is Father. Father died when he fought our attackers. He had left in such a hurry, there is still so much to be said to him, I miss him so much... and Nikos could only gape incredulously, convinced that his sister had gone mad from the grief.

There came a point, after the crossing of the second Griada, that the three had to ford a wide river. When that was happening, the water, which up till then went halfway up their shin, rose gradually until it threatened to reach their waists, and thus to wash them away; a storm far upstream had swollen the river. The three picked up their pace to reach the opposite banks, with increasing urgency. Nikolaus jettisoned his supplies, as did Elena, but Chrysanthi refused to give up her charge to the river, and she trudged on while the distance between her and her mother and brother grew. 

Fuming, Nikolaus turned back to reach Chrysanthi. "Sister," he commanded. "Get rid of your load." 

When he found that his persuasion was to no avail, he untied the cloth knot that fastened her luggage around her forcibly, ignoring her protests. "Baba!" she shrieked, as her belongings was taken away in the current, and she had to be dragged unwillingly and bodily to the opposite bank, first wading, then swimming, as the water had gone up to their chests by the time all had successfully crossed.

Chrysanthi was brought to shore inconsolable. "We have to find Baba," she wept. "we lost Baba in the river."

"Don't worry, my bird," cooed Elena, trying to be reassuring. "you only lost a stone. The stone is not Baba. The real Baba is up in Heaven, watching over us."

"What a big deal to make over a piece of stone," snapped Nikolaus, who had become impatient and resentful that his rescue efforts were not acknowledged.

"Oh, but it is him, it is," insisted Chrysanthi, stamping her feet.

"Come on now! We will find a new Baba somewhere along the way."

"What?"

Nicolaus repeated. "Find a new Baba—" and fell backwards, his head hitting the graveled bank. When he came to he felt a warmth streaming down the front of his face, and the taste of blood in his mouth: His sister had knocked him over with a punch square in the nose. "How dare you say such a thing? There is only one Baba!" she hissed, scandalized, her voice trembling. Her fist was still clenched, but a look of profound loss had washed over her. Nicolaus came vaguely to a understanding that he had said something unforgivably foolish.

The decision was made, on Mother's immovable authority, to wait for the floodwaters to subside and to find Baba on the exposed river-bed, as far as that could be done. The water level receded the very next day in sunny conditions. The three combed the river-bed again, starting where they had crossed and moving downstream, hoping to find Chrysanthi's piece of slate or any other useful tool or trinket they had cast into the river during the crossing. In the afternoon they came to a cataract, and found about half of their things in the plunge pool. The surprise find, however, was when Elena found Baba himself.

"But how did you tell?" asked Nikolaus, puzzled. "Baba was stone, and the river bed is all stone. They would have been all mixed up by now."

But it was not all the same stone. The rock that Elena had picked up was shale, but by a fortunate turn, the rock found in this river bed was different from earlier; a light-colored aggregate. And so Baba-rock was easy to pick out from the rest of the pebbles, even though he had disintegrated. After a meticulous search leaving no stone unturned, the trio collected about ten pieces of shale in all, which they brought to the monastery.

2. Young Arkadius found Makarios at his work bench, leaning against it and staring intently at ten pieces of shale laid out upon the desktop. He was amused at the bishop's earnestness.

"Are you debating with yourself, if you would fashion an idol for this poor child?" asked Arkadius after some time.

"I'm not sure if this would count on the same rank as a golden calf at all," replied the bishop. "Chrysanthi Kazoglou has all her wits about her. If you mean that she thinks that these pieces of shale are literally her dead father, I would argue that this is not the case."

"What do you make of it, then?"

"If you imagined yourself going through what she has, you might be able to understand why she had risked her life in the river to keep it," said Makarios. "You are working through the loss of a loved one. You are thinking of him day and night. Someone whom you have poured yourself out for for much of your life is gone suddenly. For someone in this situation, it would mean having to think of their loved ones not just as dead, but diffuse; Even with the assurance of heaven, her father occupies the space of everywhere and nowhere, an abstract, cerebral state as yet out of reach of normal human interactions. This unpalatable state of affairs is what got Chrysanthi so attached to the rock." He swept his hand over the shale. "And this is my cure for her."

In a sand cast, Makarios-Aspag arranged the shards of shale into what he imagined to be the flat, oblong shape of the original rock. He melted down tin in a crucible and poured it into the case, so that the tin filled the cast and seeped into the gaps between the shale pieces. Then, from a piece of tree stump, he fashioned a base for the restored tablet, so that it could stand on its own and be placed anywhere, and not need the use of another structure to lean on.

"Chrysanthi, if you would have your father's name written into the tablet, then others will know what your tablet stands for," proposed Makarios, when the project was near completion. "Will you like me to do it for you?"

But the girl only declined. "No, thank you. There is no need," she said. After perusing the restored Stone-Father in her hands with an air of placid resignation, she took him with her to be installed in her own room.

Source: Kintsugi Australia

Notes

1. The story is a meditation on the role of the spirit tablet (lingwei 靈位 / ihai 位牌, etc.) as a common method of ancestor reverence in East Asian societies.

2. The Aspag's method of restoring Baba's tablet is a very crude re-interpretation of the fine art of kintsugi 金継ぎ (pictured above).

3. The geology of the Taymyr Peninsula takes reference from this survey (Zhang et al. 2013; Geosciences 2013, 3(3), 502-527, see extracted Figure 1 below). The shale tablet was collected by Chrysanthi from the first river bed in the area shaded orange ("Riphean to Carboniferous carbonates and shales"). The flash flood occurred further to the south-east, in the white region where sedimentary rock is found instead, which is important to how the tablet was recovered afterwards.