STORIES MY MOTHER TOLD ME

 

STORIES MY MOTHER TOLD ME

 

My mother was always known for her ability to tell stories.

 

From the earliest days of my childhood, I recall sitting at her side while she told me the stories of her own childhood in the Karroo – stories of the cold; of the miles which she had to walk to school; of the rides which her brothers gave her on the handlebars of their bicycles; of the visitors who came to their isolated little house in the great silence along the railway-lines which her father maintained for the government; of incidents with her six brothers and sisters; of the brief spell which she spent working as a switchboard operator in Herold, Western Cape; of her life as a young nurse at the East Rand Hospital in Johannesburg.

 

Eventually we tired of the stories, after a lifetime of re-telling, but what vivid colour and what life she breathed into them. She was being generous in her way – she shared her life with us in those stories. When we eventually saw the places which she had spoken about, it was as if we were returning to something which we had once known ourselves. Such is the power of a good story.

 

Even when I was a university student, I remember bringing friends home for meals, and sometimes mom would come out with one of those stories, and manage to hold them enthralled in the details of an anecdote about a life and a childhood which must have seemed completely foreign to these sophisticated and cynical young people of the world. They didn’t just listen because they were polite. Some of them were far from polite in their normal conduct. They listened because these frequently humorous, whimsical tales of days gone by provided both information and entertainment which were clearly perceived as being part of our home environment, and to know us meant getting to know them.

 

Looking back, it occurs to me that I now only remember the fact that she told us those tales – the tales themselves seem to have evaporated like the morning mist, and I can no longer remember a single one. Only the overall impression remains, an artificial memory of scenes, events and incidents which I could not possibly have experienced myself, implanted through the charming telling and re-telling of mother’s tales. Her life, like a reel of tape, wound off the reel of her own existence, and wound onto the reel of others.

 

My father, who must have heard the stories many more times than me, would listen and laugh at the humour – sometimes his face would start to crumple into a smile before she got to the punch-line, knowing that it was coming. And then he laughed and laughed, till the tears ran down his cheeks and the handkerchief came out and he lifted his glasses to mop them away, and mom, who for all we knew had probably just told us a whopper of a lie, would protest through squeals of her own laughter, “It’s true! It’s true! – He really said that!”

 

Even now, as she lies at the end of her days in a hospital bed, her mind, detached from reality, is still spinning those yarns, and still, we listen, and we laugh, and she knows that our laughter is not hostile. How strange. Even in dying, she remains an entertainer, driven by forces which none of us understand. After two days of desperate struggle for survival, in which not a coherent word was uttered, she has emerged from that dark cloud clutching crazy tales which apparently have to be shared, and as always, she tells them with wide-eyed awe, as if she were as amazed by what she has to say as we are to hear it.

 

Last night she told us that, as she knew she was going to be discharged from hospital soon, she had got some champagne to share with the staff. But alas, she gave them the champagne to open, and they took it away and drank it all, and she never got a sip of it. She says at first she thought they had found it to be “off” and had thrown it away, but, no, it was good champagne and they must have drunk it all, the lousy sods!

 

Then she asked us whether we knew that there were mechanical robots working at the hospital. She said one of them came and stood right at her bedside last night, and she spoke to it for quite a while before she realized that it was a robot. It didn’t answer her, but it did offer her a cigarette, which she declined, as she didn’t want to start smoking again.

 

She also told Maxine and Jacob that a woman on the other side of the Intensive Care Unit had two cats, who visited her through the open window above her. The one lay on her lap, and the other lay beside her bed. She also had a brightly-coloured little bird, who wasn’t troubled by the cats at all, and who visited through the window.

 

For me the creepiest tale was about an old grey nun, in a long grey veil, who visits the ward at night and moves silently from bed to bed in the darkness. Mom says she is actually a “retired nun”, who likes to offer prayer for the sick, and who asked mom if she could pray for her. Mom said she could, and the old nun prayed for her.

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(c) Harry Friedland 2006