Now the adventure begins, I thought, as our train to Lom pulled out of Sofia's Central Station. Nicky, a friend who works as a translator, was going home to vote and had invited me to stay with his family. I came in search of my Bulgarian relatives twenty years after the last member of the Canadian branch had come to visit.

But where to begin? All I had was the street address of my grandmother's house in Lom and the name of a village - Belotintsi - where my grandfather had been born in 1894. Nicky's father, who met us at the station, treated me like his own son; his resemblance to my own father was uncanny. Even though both my dad and I had been born in Canada, Bulgarian culture had obviously taken root. Just like dad used to do, Nicky's father sat shirtless at the kitchen table slurping his homemade soup, chewing on hot peppers, and eating banitsa for dessert.

Grandma Nikolina's house fell into disrepair after her entire family emigrated in 1930. Nicky and I found her street with the help of his friend, Luisa, a local lawyer. Unfortunately, the house had been torn down, replaced by a brand-new residence of sorts. The hotel owners eyed me suspiciously as I snapped photos of the place, convinced that a Canadian spy was in their midst - on election-day, no less. Luisa explained why I was there, but the owners, fearing the worse, threatened to call the police.

We retreated to a beach on the Danube, crowded with soldiers who had been given four hours off to vote. We sipped cool drinks and gazed at the green forests on the Romanian side. I told Luisa the sad story of my grandmother, sixteen-year-old Nikolina Pavlova, put on a ship in 1925 and forced to marry an unknown Bulgarian labourer - my grandfather Ivan.

"Nowadays it would be called `trafficking in women,'" Nicky commented, "but in 1925, it was just an arranged marriage."

I was struck by the contrast between these two women from Lom: Nikolina, with no English, no friends, living in an isolated village in northern Ontario, and Luisa, a thoroughly modern, educated, worldly professional who speaks several languages. "Nikolina slowly went crazy in the bush. There wasn't even a road, and the only way to leave town was on a train that stopped there in the middle of the night. Sometimes she would pull the children out of bed, bundle them in warm clothes, and take them to Toronto for weeks or months at a time.

"Her behaviour grew more erratic, and once she tried to attack my father with a meat cleaver. There were rumours that she had other boyfriends during the day when Ivan was at work. Then in 1944 - fifteen years after my father was born - she was pregnant again. She was disappointed that her third child was a boy, so she dressed uncle Jimmy in girls' clothes until he was five.

In 1955 Grandma and Grandpa finally moved to Toronto, where the rest of her family had already become wealthy and well-established. The Pavlovs' success had been a direct result of Nikolina's forced marriage. She felt used by her own family. She was bitter and she lashed out: when dad married my mom, grandma wouldn't even let her in the house because he hadn't married a Bulgarian girl.

"Nikolina's health grew worse. She contracted diabetes, and the doctors warned her to be careful of her diet. But by this point she just didn't care: dad said she ate herself to death. At the age of 54, she died of a heart attack on a train. She had been on her way to Montreal to visit her son Alexander.

"I was only five when she died," I said. "But I remember her scowl and the hard lines on her face. I always wanted to ask her about her life."

"Well, let's ask her," Luisa said. "I know a Gypsy fortune-teller in town who might be able to reach her."

"Well, why not?" I said finally. "What better place to invoke Grandma's spirit than right here in her birthplace? And when will I ever be in Lom again?"

On the outskirts of Lom we sat in the shade of a small Gypsy house, surrounded by wandering chickens, peach trees and a lush vegetable garden. A scrawny bitch, all skin and bones, was nursing five pups. A dark-haired boy peered out of the shack, then came up and played with my cell phone.

The clairvoyant beckoned us, and we walked through a curtain of multi-coloured ribbons that hung over the entrance. I eased myself onto a sofa covered in gold embroidery and stared at the makeshift Ouija board, worn out from years of doom and gloom, I thought. The lady shooed away her grandson, repeated Grandma's name thirty or forty times, then slipped into a trance.

"You have come far," she told me. "You are talented. You will have stomach problems."
"But what about Nikolina?" I said.
"She says you are going to be successful by the end of this year, and she is happy for you."
"But what about her life? Did grandpa treat her well when she was alive?"
"She says she's sorry about what happened, but she doesn't want to talk about it."
"But she died alone on a train. What was that like?"
"She says it was difficult to die on the train. She says her heart betrayed her."

"I didn't tell her," Luisa whispered to me. "I didn't tell her that Nikolina had died of a heart attack. I just told her she had died on the train."
Disturbed, I staggered out of the house.
"It's true," I said as we walked back to town, "her heart betrayed her."

I thought about Nikolina's hard life and my eyes filled with tears. What if she had never left here? I was happy Grandma had wished me well. But another part of me wished I had never come here.

Victor Janoff is a Canadian currently in Bulgaria working as a consultant for a Canadian NGO. Since his arrival he has been searching for his long-lost relatives. This column is part two in his four-part series on his search.