Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  Nasrudin is alive and well in modern times. My friend Mathilde Stephanian came up to me the other day with a recent Hodja story. It seems that a rich man was dying, and he wanted to take his wealth with him into the grave. He entrusted it to the lawyer, the sheik and his good friend Hodja Nasrudin. After he died, the three trustees met at the graveside. The lawyer said, “They say you can’t take it with you. What does he need the money for where he’s gone? I’m going to keep my share.” The sheik agreed. Hodja was shocked by this, and said, “You are betraying your promise to our late friend! I, on the other hand, intend to fulfill my obligation.” He took out a chequebook, wrote a cheque and threw it into the grave.

  The last time I was in Israel, pre-Intifada and treaty with Egypt, an Israeli Jew told me a Hodja story. There was a man who owned some land, and he had to go away for a while. He left it in the care of another man. This man took good care of the land. He weeded and watered it, labouring hard to make the land green and prosperous. When the owner returned he said, “You’ve done your work, and now the land will be mine again.”

  “No,” said the other. “The land belongs to me now. I have made it thrive. The land is mine.” They began to fight—“The land belongs to me!” “No, it is mine!”—and finally came to Hodja to solve the dispute. He lay down and put his ear in the dirt.

  “What are you doing, Nasrudin?”

  “I’m listening to the land,” he said.

  “What does the land say?” they asked scornfully.

  Hodja looked up and said, “The land says that both of you belong to the land.”

  People have been telling these stories for centuries as an antidote to bullies, dogmas, authorities, pretension, social class. When the theocracy was being established in Iran, apparently the Ayatollah strongly disapproved of his people’s love for the irrepressible Hodja. An Iranian friend of mine told me that Hodja Nasrudin was drafted into the Revolutionary Army and put on guard duty to enforce the curfew. He and a fellow-sentry saw a man running like mad through the streets of Tehran five minutes before curfew. Hodja raised his rifle and shot the poor man dead. “Are you crazy?” shouted the other guard. “He still had five minutes before curfew!” “Yes,” said Hodja, “but I know where he lives. He never would have made it in time.”

  Hodja is still with us. I picture him astride his irreverent and unbiddable ass, turban tilting and slipping as he and his mount amble along beside the Information Superhighway. It is said that you should always tell seven Nasrudin stories at a time, so here’s one more (mind you, who’s counting? Hodja certainly wouldn’t). Hodja rode by a computer store and asked, “What are you selling?” The salesman proudly said, “Virtual reality!” Hodja Nasrudin, who is, after all, an old man and rather hard of hearing, called back as he passed, “I’m glad to hear it! We need as much virtuous reality as we can get!”

  In a living oral tradition, there are stories available in the collective memory of the community that can illuminate virtually every situation and dilemma that arise. An oral tradition is an entire body of narratives, connected one to another through shared characters, settings, cultural values.

  While doing research for her film about the Grimm stories, The Duration of Life and Other Tales from the Grimms, the Canadian filmmaker Amy Bodman became fascinated by the inter-connective quality of stories within a tradition:

  [A]lthough they are so distinct and varied, when read together they start to seem oddly connected: a character named Hans, for instance, figures in many of the stories (in one, even as a hedgehog)—but after a while, rather than being about a different character with the one name, each story begins to look as if it is about the same character, but in different forms and situations…. Eventually, it becomes clear that the stories aren’t so much about specific events or topics as they are about the characters in them—and perhaps about those characters in us.

  When you immerse yourself in the Grimms’ great collection, the stories’ patterns and characters start to rhyme, as it were, with the hard-to-perceive forces that shape our lives. Hans My Hedgehog connects to Hans in Luck, which connects to Clever Hans, which connects to the hedgehog-ish, lucky and clever me. Taken all together, the stories become part of a rich and complex language, a verbal tapestry in which human life in all of its complexity can be illuminated. Bodman describes this cross-pollination of life and story as analogous to the familiar experience of hearing a timely tune on the radio:

  A story is best remembered when the listener feels it is his or her own story that is being told. A song on the radio heard for the first time may move one simply because it seems to have something to do with one’s own life, though what that is may be almost impossible to articulate.

  If the radio tunes make the background music of our dramatic lives, the stories we retell are a background narrative. When real life and Story touch, it is as perfectly timely and moving as when we hear “our” song on the radio.

  There are some experiences in life where stories provide the only language powerful enough to touch the unbearable intensity of the moment. In The Crack in the Teacup, Joan Bodger remembers the trauma of her daughter Lucy’s illness. They had shared countless fairy tales together, and the Narnia books. They were still able to speak Story when other, lesser words failed them:

  Next day, when I visited, Lucy’s head was swathed in bandages. She was drinking through a glass straw, bent at an angle. “Just like the Romans,” she said, “Lying down and drinking at the same time.” She cracked a crooked smile. She was being funny. Then, matter-of-factly, “Did I almost die?”

  Awful temptation: “Who gave you that idea?” or, “Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.” Instead: “Yes. You almost died.” Lucy sighed, satisfied. Perception confirmed! “It was like in ‘Childe Rowland,’” she told me. In the Dark Tower. The big ruby turning and turning in the warm air… I had filled her mind and Ian’s with stories for a rainy day. That-which-could-not-betalked-about came tumbling out in nuggets of imagery—fairy gold! Coin of the realm, it was the only way to make exchange, to communicate the enormity of what was happening to us.

  Later, tragically, the cancer returned. A day or two before her death, Lucy told her mother: “I feel as though I’m going on a trip to Narnia… I just wish they’d hurry up so I can get on with it and go on the trip. And if I go to Narnia I’ll send you a postcard, ‘Having a wonderful time.’” The Chronicles of Narnia didn’t, as nothing could, mitigate the family’s grief, but they did give mother and daughter a language of Story through which to talk about it.

  As you develop your storytelling repertoire, it’s important to realize that you are building on a foundation that you started creating in childhood. Each story you learn will add a new quality, depth and fluency to a second language you began to master when you first played peeka-boo.

  HUNTING AND GATHERING

  It’s amazing what you see when you’re out without your gun.

  Canadian proverb

  A STORYTELLER IS ALWAYS collecting ideas, words, phrases, stories. Only some of them are destined for your repertoire. The rest are equally valuable, although you may never tell them in public. These are the stories that inform your moral philosophy, tune your tongue and ear, and help stretch your imagination. You find them in family experiences, in your neighbourhood, in the newspaper. Storytellers dowse narrative material from a wide range of wellsprings. The story collecting described in this chapter is more serendipitous than systematic. It is a matter of walking through life with open ears and a story-seeking soul.

  One of the first things that will catch your attention as a hunter and gatherer of oral literature is the sheer originality of spoken language in everyday life. Everywhere I go I hear delicious turns of phrase, hilarious slips of the tongue, wonderfully imaginative words of mouth. Since I’m a packrat, I always write down what I hear and add it to my ever-growing book of quotes. Just the other day, sitting in my favourite café, I overheard a young woman say this enigmatic phrase to her f
riend: “’Cause the reason was, my mom had another lover.” It was so irresistibly intriguing that it went directly into my quotebook. I imagine countless untold stories held in that one line. I only record phrases and saying that have a certain music running through the words. Here are three recent examples from my own family:

  “They taste like shoes and smell like socks.” Jacob describing my attempt at mushroom-flavoured risotto.

  “You did what? To who? For how many Oreo cookies?” Nathaniel, age 14, to a friend on the phone.

  “It’s all in the pencil!” Jacob, age 10, writing a story at a Toronto café.

  I collect these phrases with all the joy of a gem collector finding a new ruby or emerald. They demonstrate how much spontaneity and creativity can be found in the flow of daily conversation. They also distill entire stories—or possible stories—into miniature form. “Your mother’s got another lover?” I wanted to ask the woman at Dooney’s Café. “Isn’t one enough?” But, being discreet, I kept my mouth shut and my ears open.

  Sometimes these phrases do wind up in a story. I was once at a youth hostel in London, England. A group of men were playing Arabic music in the common room, and noticed me listening. One of them asked me, “You are an Arab?” “Not exactly,” I explained. “I was born in Detroit, I live in Toronto, my mother’s Romanian, my grandparents are Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Turkish, and I’m a Jew.” He said he was from Algeria, and we started talking, as travellers do. The evening went by quickly. Before going to sleep, I said to him, “See you in the morning.” He answered with the traditional Muslim response: “Inshallah—Allah willing!” I smiled and said, “Is it necessary to say ‘God willing’ even for one night?’ He gripped my arm and said, with real intensity, “A man does not know the hour of his own death.” I never forgot his proverb, and it became part of the Storyteller’s final speech to the King in my tale “The Storyteller At Fault” (see the Stories section of this book, page 251).

  In this realm of oral poetry, every schoolyard in the world becomes a mini-festival of rhymes, poems and songs at recess time. Iona and Peter Opie begin their famous book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by stating, “The scraps of lore which children learn from each other are at once more real, more immediately serviceable, and more vastly entertaining to them than anything which they learn from grown-ups.” Storytellers would do well to listen in on this daily and exuberant linguistic celebration. For one thing, these rhymes help tune your tongue and can add new music to your telling. For another, they connect you directly to one of the few sources of living oral tradition in our society. Lastly, they are windows back to your own childhood.

  The children in my neighbourhood grew up chanting this inspired bit of nonsense:

  Ladies and jellybeans

  hoboes and tramps

  cross-eyed mosquitoes

  and bow-legged ants

  I come before you

  to stand behind you

  to speak of something

  I know nothing about!

  The mock introduction was often followed by a speech:

  One fine day in the middle of the night

  Two dead boys got up to fight

  Back to back they faced each other

  Pulled their guns and shot each other

  A deaf policeman heard the noise

  And came and shot those two dead boys,

  If you don’t believe my story’s true

  Ask the blind man, he saw it, too.

  We counted out with:

  Engine, engine number nine

  Goin’ down the Chicago line

  If the train should jump the track

  Do you want your money back

  Yes, no, maybe, y-e-s spells yes!

  For a sense of how these rhymes and sayings can enrich a child’s life and provide a background for anyone who loves literature, read Alice Kane’s Songs and Sayings of an Ulster Childhood, edited by Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke. It is Kane’s memoir of growing up in Belfast, her childhood framed by an extraordinary wealth of oral poetry, proverbs and music. Alice Kane writes, “It’s impossible to describe the riches poured on the children of my day. Every grown-up in the family contributed riddle or joke or book or story to inform or amuse or correct.” Describing her own belief that life must be faced courageously and with a high heart, she would often quote her favourite childhood saying: It is a poor heart that never rejoices.

  I was walking along St. Clair Avenue once, with two five-year-old boys and a seven-year old girl trailing behind. They were chanting an innocent-sounding verse and laughing hysterically. I turned to see what all the commotion was about. The rhyme said: Milk milk lemonade / Push the button, chocolate cake. As they sang, they touched their chests, then where they pee, and finally the place out back where, as we say around here, “the sun don’t shine.” As children master their inheritance of oral lore, they quickly learn that one of its uses is to mock and experiment with the mysterious rules and taboos of the adult world. At the age of six, my youngest son came home from school delighted with a new poem:

  In the land of Oz,

  where the ladies wear no bras,

  the men don’t care,

  they’re not wearing underwear,

  there’s a hole in the wall,

  where the children see it all.

  This same child, at three, discovered riddles. He didn’t know how they worked yet, but he revelled in the fact that he could stump a roomful of adults with a peculiarsounding question. He made this one up, and it worked every time: What’s brown and red and pink and blue and black and white and red and yellow? What? we asked with futile hope. A donkey, he chortled gleefully.

  I love riddles, myself, and often use them to start storytelling sessions. Riddles are wonderful collector’s tools. If you pose a riddle to a group, especially of children, chances are you’ll hear a few back. Here’s one of my favourites, collected from a Jamaican boy in a suburban school:

  The schoolhouse is green,

  the hallway is white,

  the classroom is red,

  the students are black, brown, and white.

  The riddle is particularly timely in a multicultural society. The answer is: A watermelon.

  As storytellers, the value of revisiting these rhymes and riddles is first of all the sheer pleasure of hearing such glorious oral poetry bubbling up in playgrounds, kitchens and backyards. We also learn that language is by its very nature a musical experience. The meaning of words cannot be separated from the tune that carries them from tongue to ear. Storytelling is an oral medium. Your voice and the language of your story must engage and hold the ear of your listener as fully as a sonata, a jazz riff, a gospel song or a piece of hiphop. If all the language in your story sounded the same, how would the listener’s ear distinguish the prelude from the climax, or the moment of greatest suspense from the casual throwaway line?

  Storytellers often read their daily newspapers with a pair of scissors close by. I’m always on the lookout for old tall tales, ghost stories and yarns that resurface as modern news reports. I have a whole folderful of such clippings. I collect them because they represent traces of living oral tradition in our everyday lives. Here are three from the files, collected most unsystematically over the years.

  Nova Scotia Woman Finds Froggie Surprise in her Frozen Peas (Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia—Canadian Press): Jackie Silver isn’t making her children eat their greens any more. Not after finding a dead frog mixed in with a bag of frozen McCain’s peas a short time ago. “I went to stir them when they were halfway through cooking and I saw this thing,” Silver said. “Most of the kids started crying. Most of them will only eat peas so I don’t know what I’m going to do now.” Silver hasn’t had much of an appetite since finding the little fellow, she said. “The sad thing is it’s missing its legs, so I don’t know if it’s in the peas somewhere or if it’s already been consumed…. I didn’t want to know for sure.” A spokesperson for frozen food giant McCain’s said the co
mpany was investigating.

  Kitty Mauls Senior (Trois-Rivières-Ouest, Quebec—Canadian Press): Four carloads of police, two ambulances and an animal control officer were needed to control a cat that mauled an elderly man. The commotion in the apartment was so great that police responded in force believing they were dealing with a domestic dispute. They found Gerard Daigle and Francine Gagnon, both in their eighties, cornered in their bathroom by Touti, a caramel-coloured feline. The cat was spooked by water when Daigle turned on the shower to bathe his parrot, the animal control officer said yesterday. Guy Theriault, who finally captured the cat, said it was scared and reacted with force. “It was scared of the water,” he said, “It felt threatened.” Daigle was jumped by Touti on Tuesday just after he had given his parrot a shower. Hearing her husband’s cries, Gagnon beat the cat off him with a broom as it clawed him in several places, inflicting deep scratches. The couple barricaded the bathroom door with a broom and cowered there. The cat, which weighed about four kilos, was put down and an autopsy was ordered.

  Girl Turns Orange from Drink (from The Globe and Mail): A 5-year-old girl in north Wales has turned orange after over-imbibing Sunny Delight, a popular fruit drink that contains significant levels of beta carotene. The child’s face and hands turned orange after she consumed three litres of the drink per day.

  I read all of these in my morning newspaper. Each story has something memorably absurd in it. The fact that a family whose children eat only peas has the misfortune to find a frog in their pea package, or that the poor senior citizen was “jumped by Touti on Tuesday”—you have to laugh. On the other hand, if I ever read these clippings aloud to groups of adults, someone invariably has known somebody whose kid also turned orange (or green, or purple) from drinking too much pop, or who found a mouse/frog/rat or other inappropriate visitor in their fast food. Often cautionary in nature (don’t drink too much Sunny Delight, don’t eat too much fast food, and mind the cat when you’re cleaning your parrot), these stories, true or not, are part of the oral literature of everyday life. They are, in their wonderfully weird way, a tribute to the irrepressible strength of the spoken word. Scholars like Jan Brundvand, author of The Vanishing Hitch-hiker, and Gail de Vos in her collection Tales, Rumors, and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 7–12, have shown that virtually all of our modern urban legends have an ancient lineage. There were undoubtedly rumours circulating around Rome about a rat found in an amphora of wine, and scholars have shown that the Roman soldiers around their campfires were already telling versions of the Ghostly Hitchhiker. It reminds me of the old proverb about the bad penny always showing up. So it is with the oral tradition, even here, even now.