Open Writing

There was always a little hollow in the grass where Spider lay. I would drive slowly up the road and between the well-tended lawns of Holy Cross Hospital, and the little black cat would be there: a stray that had appeared one night and been fed and watered by the nuns ever since. They had called him Spider because he behaved like one; you never saw him move, but he did, with all the speed and stealth of his namesake. A more silent, secretive little cat I never saw.

For four months I had a directive from the language school where I worked. I was to go and teach English to a visiting Sister. I love my job. To look a complete stranger in the eye - different culture, different religion - and know that I have to teach that person to communicate in my language is as great an adrenaline rush to me as climbing a mountain would be to someone else.

I had been told that Sister Nair was from Brazil and that she was Japanese - and of course she was a Catholic. An interesting blend of anachronisms, I thought. How did this come about? Why was she coming to this hospital? Why had she left Japan? And so on and so on. I was to be there for two hours every day from eleven to one o’clock, because that was when she was free of either religious or hospital commitments. I had wondered what on earth to prepare for this first lesson, but in any event I was full of anticipation at the thought of the task ahead of me.

On the first morning I made sure that I was early. I had been to Holy Cross before when my son was there, but this was the first time that I had gone past the hospital and out to the manicured gardens surrounding the convent. The Mother Superior was waiting for me in the entrance hall, and standing beside her was Sister Nair, so small, so completely Japanese, so meek. She was not young, and I could see straightaway why a ‘mature’ teacher had been asked for. We were introduced, and a moment or two later we were alone together in the cool, austere drawing room. Any connexion, any rapport, any progress would be entirely up to me in the months to come.

This is the story of Nair and how she came to be in the circumstances where I met her. It’s not an account of how to teach or how to give someone the skills to learn. All the teachers in the world have different ways of doing that. On the first morning I learnt that she did have a fair knowledge of English, but she had not been required to speak it. She spoke Portuguese at the mission hospital outside Sao Paulo, and Japanese with members of her family.

“Why have you come here?” I asked, and she told me that an invitation had come after one of the nuns had visited her mission in Brazil. She would be part of the community here, polish up her English for four months, and then join an advanced study group in Jerusalem. Right, I thought. I know now, I can see where this is leading, but we can’t spend the next four months gently exchanging question and answer behind the windows of this cool, vanilla room, the sweet scent of lavender polish suspended between ceiling and floor. Neither can we use a normal grammar programme, I thought: there’s too much there, too much has happened somewhere along the line. I shall have to find out just what it is.

At the end of the lesson I asked her to bring a family photograph the next day: could she please begin to write something about her family, the beginnings of an autobiography and she could read it to me and both practise her spoken English and explain things as we went along. That was to be her homework, and I was sure there was a new gleam in her eyes as we parted company. Was this to be the way to open the floodgates? Little did I know what an unusual story would unfold in the coming weeks.

The next morning Spider was asleep in the middle of his ‘web’ and Sister Nair was waiting for me with a little smile and a shine in her eyes. “Well,” I thought, “something has lit a fire.” She had an exercise book in her hand, and did I imagine a certain eagerness to move into the sitting room and begin the lesson? No, I didn’t imagine it at all, she was eager to show me her photo and how much she had written. I wondered if the other Sisters had asked her about her life, or was that considered irrelevant now that she had joined a Holy Order? I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. I was just surprised and very glad to see her enthusiasm.

The days went by and her autobiography grew to epic proportions, and although her use of English improved enormously, I learnt so much more from her just by listening. Thank you, Nair. Thank you so much. This is the outline of her story.

*

Nair’s story: ‘My father and his first wife left Japan in 1926. It was a bad time, and the economy was not good, and many young families left their country and went to Brazil. They had just had a baby daughter, their first child, but she had to stay in Japan and be cared for by her grandmother. This happened to a lot of children who were too young to work. The plan was for the child to stay with grandmother until her parents had made enough money to return.

My father (though he was not yet my father) was a hard worker, and he and his wife found employment with a farmer who was rearing chickens. After a few months, with a new baby being expected, the wife went out into the fields one day to take lunch to my father but as she waited for him in the sun a snake came out of the undergrowth and bit her. She died in the fields with my father beside her.

After three years my father met and married another Japanese woman, and in time they had eleven more children. I was the one in the middle. The first daughter in Japan was never seen again by my father though two of my sisters have been to see her since they grew up.

As we grew up we all had to learn Portuguese and we all had to become Catholics.

My father was very strict and when we were old enough to decide what we wanted to do in life, he said that we must all wait our turn, and first we had to help him. By this time all his hard work had paid off and he had his own farm growing and distributing tomatoes. It didn’t matter how successful he was, we all knew that whatever it was we wanted to do, it had to wait until father was ready to release us. One by one we were allowed to go to university or study for something else. I had always wanted to join a medical mission, and another of my sisters wanted to be a nurse too, but I had to wait several years before it was my turn. Now I have two brothers who are doctors, one who is a lawyer and one a teacher, so perhaps it was a good thing to have to wait; we were forced to think if we had made the right decision.’

You cannot imagine the discussion and the digressing that came out of Nair’s story, the questions, the sudden burst of laughter, the sidetracking and the incredible experiences. Her life as a serving Sister had been long and rewarding, and there had been opportunities to travel to many places in the world, though as it happened the study course in Jerusalem had to be cancelled for political reasons. She had nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters in law, and her old father was still alive. It seemed that everybody still loved everybody, and to me that was something that so deserved celebrating. One day she showed me a photograph of a very elegant couple in their middle years, and I asked her to tell me about them. The man was her cousin, and as a boy he had been sent to China as a servant. This was another aspect of the hard times in Japan in the nineteen twenties. His master was very cruel: after three years he managed to escape and find his way back to Japan by working on a ship making the sea crossing. At eighteen he was forced to marry, but so unsatisfactory was the marriage that the wife would not speak to him, and as you might imagine the three children all grew up to become brilliant academics whose ability to communicate was almost non-existent. After the wife died, he went to Brazil to work, and in Nair’s photograph, he and his second wife smiled out with inscrutable Oriental eyes. How could anyone guess at all the years of misery and unfulfilment?

When we said good-bye in the late summer, we went outside together to have our photo taken. It had been raining and Spider had left his grassy hollow to find somewhere dry. We stood side by side, and Sister Mary obliged by clicking the camera, giggling like a girl and urging us to say ’cheese’. When I received mine a week or two later, the face that looked out at me was the one I had seen on that first morning a few months earlier: a Sister of Mercy, small, quite old, Japanese. Constrained and restrained by her culture and her religion as she was, I couldn’t have known how memorable she would be.

I walked down to the car park, and as the sun came out again, so did Spider. I looked back and saw Nair bend down to stroke him as they both went in for lunch.