The Making of a Storyteller

Born on Friday has some consequences as it is just a day away from Sunday but not as close as is Saturday. I must have surprised everybody, since no one planned the arrival of the fifth and last child, and certainly my mother wasn't prepared to bow to the demands of an infant in the house with her four other children. Hence, my upbringing fell into the hands of my grandmother.

Now, I vaguely remember her features, and to my child’s eyes she was already ancient like a dry tree. But she was also as wise as an owl, swinging between the branches, remembering the war-torn world through her big black eyes that knew both love and dread.

Her bedtime stories were all about the bombs and bullets being fired close to her head and always missing, of course. She told me once, when I was no older than a blink of her eyes, that she had stood up to a German officer who had held a gun to her head.

“Go on, shoot me,” she challenged him, as I imagined, by lifting her protruding chin. Her fate was in her favour to keep on spinning because the globe when the devil in front of her told her to scurry away, not wasting his bullet. She knew, as everyone else did, that no one tells a German officer what to do. Nah, she would shrug it off. To her they were all cowards. You don’t put a gun to a young girl’s head only because she isn’t from your tribe.

So, what does she have to do with my phone, on which I write these words? All my books have blood spilled from treason or something like that. The integral struggles, the thirst for love and being loved and the thorny paths embarked by a damaged hero are not so far from my grandmother’s stories about the war. There she was, going through the darkest hours in history, dodging bullets, facing traitors, vagrants, and despicable liars, never embittered, never defeated.

If I could summarise my childhood experience with the one who really brought me up, I would say it wasn’t believing in fairy tales and princesses. She was building in me a solid ground for storytelling about unfairness, treachery, hardship, and something else. Justice is a quest that many of my heroes try to find on their journey through dying sun rays, set in times where bullets may be replaced by arrows and German SS officers for mighty lords in tall wigs. I think she would have shrugged it off with her final words:

“Nah, a scythe mows a lord and a pauper; death is just, as it’s merciful for these rotten scoundrels.”

Post Views : 183