EMERGENCY STORYTELLING
Never say “whoa!” in a mudhole.
Canadian proverb
I WAS TRAVELLING in Devon many years ago when I needed to find the right story for a difficult moment. My friend Ken Sprague took me over the hills to meet his neighbour, a farmer named Edward who’d recently suffered a calamitous loss. His only son had an unsuspected heart condition, and one day when Edward had been urging him to work harder in the fields, the boy had keeled over and died in front of him. When Edward and his wife heard I was a storyteller, they poured the tea, and asked if I could tell them one of my stories. I wondered what story I could possibly tell in this grief-stricken farmhouse. Then this one (which I had heard from the American teller Barbara Freeman, but had never told myself) popped up:
A man was away from home for quite a while. He ran into a neighbour as he walked into town. “How ya’ doing?” he asked.
“All right. How ‘bout you?”
“Not bad. I’ve been away a while. Any news?”
“Nah, it’s been real quiet around here.”
“Are you sure nothing’s happened while I’ve been gone?”
“Well, now that you mention it, your dog died.”
“My dog? How did that happen?”
“He got into the barn and ate some burnt horse meat.”
“What was burnt horse meat doing in my barn?”
“When your barn burned, all the horses died in the fire.”
“You mean to say my barn burned while I was away?”
“Yep. Apparently a spark from the house caught it.”
“My house was on fire too?”
“They say it was the candles in the living room burning the curtains.”
“But what were candles doing in my living room?”
“They were all around the coffin.”
“You mean someone died while I was gone?”
“That would’ve been your mother-in-law. The shock carried her away.”
“What shock was that?”
“Hearin’ the news about your wife.”
“And what happened to my wife?”
“Oh, I guess she ran away with the gardener.”
“My wife ran away, my mother-in-law died, the house burned, the barn burned, the horses died, my dog died—and you said there wasn’t any news!”
My listeners laughed when they heard this tale of woe. Did they find in it a reflection of their own tragic history? Did hearing of someone else’s troubles make them feel less alone? Did they forget their sorrow for a moment with the story’s preposterously backward revelation of the news? Perhaps for all of those reasons, it seemed to be the right story for the occasion.
All storytellers are children of Scheherazade. Like her, we must be ready to tell stories in case of emergency. She was the great storyteller in the Thousand and One Nights who risked her life telling stories to her mad husband, King Shahriyar. Every night this deranged monarch sought revenge on all womankind by taking a virgin bride and chopping off her head in the morning. He was afraid they would betray him as his first wife had done. When Scheherazade married him, she used the most famous storytelling ruse in world literature to save her life. Each night Dunyazad, the storyteller’s little sister, would kneel by the bedside and ask for “a tale of wonder to make the hours of night pass pleasantly.” Scheherazade, with superb courage, as if she had all the time in the world to spin her yarns, answered:
Come, little sister, come near
Leave behind all of your fear
Darkness comes and night is near
But dawn shall find you sleeping here.
Then she would begin her story. But every night she stopped her stories at the most suspenseful moment, and the king, eager to hear what happened next, spared her life for another day. For a thousand and one nights she spun her marvellous yarns. One or two or even a hundred tales wouldn’t suffice. King Shahriyar needed to hear a vast range of stories, reflecting all of the permutations of human desire, dread, hope and dreams. He heard about the high ones and the lowly ones of this earth, each with his or her own destiny. He heard ancient histories and modern spoofs. Most of all, he heard about the immense, pervasive power of magic to utterly transform both kings and peasants, fearful husbands, curious wives and all who walk on the green earth by the light of day. It took the cumulative wisdom of an entire oral tradition for Scheherazade’s mad listener to be healed.
On the one-thousand-and-first night, Dunyazad brought in the three children her sister had borne (Scheherazade and the king had clearly found time for other, non-narrative activities during those three years).
“Spare my life for the sake of our children, husband of mine. My stories are ended,” said Scheherazade.
“Your tales, O Queen, beloved wife, have healed my madness,” he replied. “You have shown me that women are wise and tender, chaste and eloquent. My grief and rage are ended, for I see now that the two things men cannot control are destiny and a woman’s soul. May all your ancestors be blessed and may your descendants find favour with Allah; for me, this one-thousand-and-first night is more radiant than the day itself….” (and so on in like manner, for Shahriyar had become a storyteller himself by now).
The story of Scheherazade’s heroic storytelling reminds me that every time a tale is told, the souls of both teller and listener may be in the balance. Storytelling is not only an entertaining way to pass the time. It is also an art that can mend broken souls.
In a speech given at York University in Toronto, the great Hungarian poet George Faludy recalled that in Recsk labour camp in Stalinist Hungary, he and his fellow-prisoners were near death from starvation and disease. Every night the men gathered around Faludy as he told them stories, recited opera libretti, discoursed on Renaissance art, shared all the poetry he knew by heart. The prisoners who scorned these whispered narratives and went off to catch an extra hour of sleep were the ones who died first. Faludy’s circle of loyal listeners survived. “I cannot claim,” he said, “that this saved us from death, but it did undoubtedly save us from the despair that inevitably resulted in death.”
Because storytelling is portable, requires no props, and can be activated immediately, under any circumstances, it is wonderfully adapted to emergency situations. The American storyteller Laura Simms has been very active in helping African children who were kidnapped and forced to become soldiers. One fifteen-year-old boy was brought directly from the battle zone in Sierra Leone to address a conference at the United Nations in New York. Without a visa, he couldn’t stay. He was utterly terrified at the prospect of returning to his war-torn land. In the taxi to the airport, Simms asked the boy what she could do for him. “Please tell me a story,” he replied. This is the story she told:
There was once a poor boy who went to a market. He had no money to buy anything. He wanted everything. In the market was a magician performing a magic act. He had a magic finger. Anything he touched turned to gold. The boy watched the magician with amazement. The magician asked, “Would you like some gold?”
The boy said, “Yes.”
The magician turned a mouse to gold. But the boy refused it. He said, “I want more.” The magician turned one thing after another to gold. Each thing larger than the last. The boy continued to reject his offers, saying, “I want more.” At last the magician demanded, “What do you want?”
The boy answered, “I want a magic finger.”
Simms noticed that as she told the story, the boy listened calmly, no longer hysterical. The United Nations official in the taxi, puzzled by the storyteller’s choice of narrative, asked, “What good was that story?” But the boy said, “I understood the story. The boy will survive because he will settle for nothing less than his future.” The boy did have to return to his nightmarish country, but after many months of work Laura Simms finally brought him out of Sierra Leone to safety.
In our own family, storytelling was an essential part of surviving a very difficult time. Our second son was born as
close to death as a baby can be, with an Apgar score of two (seven being considered the standard for a healthy newborn). We used to say his first language was BEEP since he spent his first three weeks learning the mother tongue of intensive care, the beep beep beep of monitors tolling the electronic measure of his vital signs.
We entered the world of the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) one August night in 1991. It can be the most clinical of worlds, where human landmarks are hard to find. Extreme hope and extreme dread rule the ward. You live for the doctors’ rounds, the marks made on the charts, the slightest sign of progress. You treat the doctors’ every word like the message of an oracle. Yet in the midst of the NICU’s medical miracles, one longs for some kind of old and tested wisdom. The ancient, affirming language of fate and tragedy has been replaced by medical test talk, genetic reports and the omnipresent beep. The doctors may save the babies, some of them, but all of their medicines and tests will not give you the bearings you need to navigate this unpredictable, terrifying experience. That wisdom you have to find for yourself.
Emergencies happen at two speeds: rush and reverie. The fast part started the moment he was born. He was as white as paper. They hustled him to the examination table before his mother had a chance to hold him. He was too frail for holding.
He’d been born with his cord wrapped around a leg, blood draining out of his body faster than it was being replenished. The GP had never seen a cord twisted like that. Our son was waxy-looking, his skin curiously uncreased; his eyes as bruised as if he’d gone ten rounds in a dockside bar; his features hung on the tiny frame of his face with no animating force to pull them into proportion; his ears were abnormally low, his chin small. An alien baby too weak to make a human cry. The pediatrician chose his words carefully as he spoke to me out in the hall. Heart? Asphyxiation? There were “subtle signs” of a mysterious syndrome. Or perhaps not. A transfusion would be done if there was no internal bleeding. Tests were needed. He might not live. If he did live… the doctor looked grim. The transfer team was on its way over from the Hospital for Sick Children to Women’s College, the hospital where he was born.
As the medical crisis speeded up, I fell into a reverie, the other, self-protective cadence of calamity. You focus on one simple thing at a time and leave all panic and fuss to the others. As the baby lay, perhaps dying, on the examination table in the corner, I went to my wife. Her fast, unanaesthesized labour had exhausted her and there’d been no chance for the elation that should be part of the mother’s healing from giving birth. I came to her and cried, “We have to give him his name right away!” I had an urgent desire to name him. A name is a talisman, a sign of stepping away from oblivion and towards the world of the living. We had chosen a name earlier, one we’d inherited from her Quaker and my Jewish ancestry. We whispered it aloud to each other and agreed that it would be his name, no matter what happened next. I stepped back to the nurses, midwife and doctors and told them that the baby they were trying to save had a name. He was Jacob.
The transfer team arrived. They quickly began a transfusion, busying themselves with needles and tubes. I leaned over the rolling crib and put my hands on Jacob’s head and belly. The nurses were worried he was too weak to be handled, but I couldn’t bear the thought he might leave the world untouched, unrocked. I moved him very gently from side to side, a millimetre each way, and hummed the lullaby I used to sing to his older brother. The nurse, in her wisdom, took a snapshot of him as he lay there, slowly regaining colour, his eyes swollen shut with bruising. When they gave it to me I dimly registered it might be the only picture we’d ever have of him.
We set out from Women’s College Hospital to the NICU, and I remember being amazed by the subterranean system of passageways we followed to get to the Hospital for Sick Children.
Later that night, when I returned to my wife’s room, we weren’t sure what to pray for—a mercifully quick leave-taking or the great luxury of hoping he’d pull through. I said to the doctors, “If he’s going to die, give him back to us.” They talked about the need for more tests. My own tears finally came when I told my wife that Jacob had danced, heard a song, been touched. I also threw things against the hospital wall. We spent the night hugging each other in the single bed.
And so began our vigil by his high-tech crib.
For three weeks I sat next to him and talked non-stop. Each NICU parent finds a way to survive. I used storytelling. The doctors don’t prescribe such things, and the nurses would sometimes look at me oddly, but talking was what came naturally. Apart from the incessant beeping and the occasional alarm, the NICU tends to be a quiet place. In the parents’ lounge, a formal and sympathetic silence is observed. You don’t ask many questions about each other’s children, knowing the answers might be too painful to hear. There’s a trend now at the NICU to encourage parents to read aloud, sing lullabies and converse with their babies; but at the time I seemed to be the only parent yakking away.
It was a long time before he opened his eyes, and suckled, and made a bit of noise. It took many days for him to gain strength. One of the doctors told me it was truly puzzling. All of his tests came back negative. Miraculously, no faculties or organs had been damaged by his horrendous experience. But the life-force hadn’t flared in him yet. There was another baby on the ward, massively braindamaged, but suckling like a trooper. Yet our boy had hardly the strength to take in a few millilitres of the milk his mother expressed for him. I asked Dr. Perlman, one of the NICU heads, if we should prepare for life with a special needs child, and he answered cryptically, “Not yet. Sometimes the things we don’t understand are the ones that clear up by themselves.” That was the hope we held on to. But meanwhile, where was Jacob?
I imagined our son at an immense distance from earth, a Star Boy balancing out among the farthest and coldest stars, loath to make the final jump into a human body. He’d expected warmth, succour, a pleasant shelter, sweet milk. Instead, there was this frail shell smelling of antiseptic, with formula running down a naso-gastric tube and needles stuck in tender places. Not what a Star Boy would much want to get born into. So I decided—or, more truthfully, felt compelled—to tell him stories, stories about the place he wasn’t sure he wanted to land in.
The first story I told him was “The Miller’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This is by far the most useful thing I’ve ever memorized. Its six hundred lines of Middle English hexameters have stood me very well in many difficult situations. Telling Jacob the poem over and over kept me from going mad with worry. As for him, he heard all about the beautiful and “likerous” young wife Alisoun, and Nicolas, her lusty lover. He heard about the trick Alisoun played on the vain Absolon, and how he, thinking he was kissing her on the lips, encountered something rather different: “Aback he sterte, and thoughte it was amiss, for wel he wiste a womman hath no berde—he felte a thyng al roughe and longe yhered…” In the flow of Chaucer’s poetry, my infant son heard the music of desire, love, wit and surprise. From The Canterbury Tales I progressed to Kipling’s Jungle Book and Just-So Stories. They were already on my list of the ten greatest books ever written in English, and reading them aloud in the hospital confirmed my high opinion of them.
Then I told Jacob about my great-uncle Simon and the time his grandmother saved his life. I’d learned this story when I was just becoming a storyteller, and wanted to know more about our family chronicles. Simon lived in São Paulo, Brazil, and I wrote to him asking for stories. This was the story he sent back.
Simon had been a soldier in the First World War. He and his brother were arrested during the demobilization in Europe. They had tried to get food for their sick and hungry mother and been caught still in uniform. For this crime they were shipped to northern Romania, to a military garrison five hundred miles from Bucharest. They were going to be judged by a military tribune and most likely executed by firing squad. The morning of the trial, as they were being driven to their trial, Simon’s brother asked, “Do you ever think of grandmother?
” “No,” said Simon, “she’s been dead for so many years.” “It’s strange,” said his brother. “I dreamed of her last night. She was lying on a couch and looked very tired. I asked her why she was so exhausted, and she said, ‘If you knew how far I’ve come to save you today, you wouldn’t ask that question!’”
That morning, to their utter astonishment, the seven military judges declared them innocent and free. Their mother had somehow managed to catch a freight train and persuade the tribunal to save her sons. For the rest of his life Simon often marvelled at how their mother had miraculously rescued them; but he was even more amazed by the thought of where his grandmother’s spirit had come from to appear in his brother’s dream.
I imagined Jacob slowly being led back from wherever he was by a host of family ancestors and ghosts. Perhaps the great-great-grandmother who helped Simon was still roaming within soul’s range of earth, still able to help a frightened Star Boy. I wanted to put all the warmth, desire and beauty of the earth into a continuous stream of storylanguage. I wanted to guide our Star Boy home. And so I kept talking the way an air traffic controller must talk a frightened novice down when the real pilot dies at the controls. Except that instead of a steady, reassuring flow of navigational data and instrument drill, I was trying to land Jacob with a beacon of stories.
There’s a Jewish legend—and I told him this story near the end of his hospital stay—that says we each have a guardian angel. After we’re conceived, the angel takes our soul on a world tour. We visit all the places we’ll live in, see all the friends we’ll make. And though this world is different from the celestial glory we’ve been accustomed to, it is also, in its way, wonderfully beautiful and desirable. Then, just before we’re born, God presses us in the middle of our upper lip. At that moment, we forget everything we have just witnessed on our travels. The legend says we still bear the mark of this touch, on our upper lips, under the nose.
Suddenly They Heard Footsteps Page 15
