I've Been Thinking About You, Sister

1

Brian rang yesterday to ask if I would send him a short story for an anthology he was planning to publish. The trouble was he wanted the kind of story I used to write thirty years ago.

‘It should be easy for you,’ he began. ‘People love your comic stories about hockey games or sentimental ones about old ladies playing cards, not to mention the epic tales of girls who ride whales to save their iwi.’

‘Brian,’ I answered, ‘I was just a young man when I wrote those stories and the world was a different place. I’m not that same person any more, not as innocent and my voice is not as lyrical. Nor is my work so essentialist any longer; it’s more synthesised. And I’m a professor of English, into postcolonial discourse, Freire, Derrida and The Empire Writes Back.’

‘I was afraid you’d say something like that,’ Brian sighed, but he was not about to give up. ‘Maybe you’ve got a story that you put in a bottom drawer years ago, something you wrote before you became, well, political? Something like the story you wrote about the wily Maori tohunga who puts a spell on a red-headed Irish woman? Readers just love that one! Can you take a look? And if you can’t find a story, can you try to write one for me of the kind you wrote when you were younger? And keep politics out of it? Not that there’s anything wrong with the stories you write now,’ he added hastily, ‘but they’re, well, a bit more difficult for the gentle reader. You don’t mind my saying that, do you?’

Irritated, I put the telephone down. I had worked so hard to become an indigenous writer of some critical distinction, somebody whom critics could admire for my polish and fearlessness in articulating the indigenous position. I had established myself as a writer who was not afraid to engage the complexities of race, identity and representation and examine the polarities that existed between majority and minority cultures. Despite this, while I now garnered hard-earned accolades from critics, the people who actually bought my books were always telling me that my earlier stories and novels were better. Some reviewers, when I started rewriting the earlier work, scolded me. ‘Ah well,’ tutae happens.

Two days later, however, I began the following story, which happened to my mother in 1989. Being a fiction writer, I have altered some of the details and names of those involved in the story.

My mother was looking out the kitchen window of the house at Haig Street, Gisborne, when she saw her brother Rangiora sitting in the sunlight on the back lawn. She was baking scones for a kindergarten bring and buy and had just taken the last batch from the oven; she almost dropped them.

Mum was seventy at the time and although her impulse was to rush out the door and give Uncle Rangiora a hug, instead she first went to the bathroom to splash water on her face, run a comb through her hair and put some lipstick on. The bathroom window looked over the back lawn, so Mum was able to check that he was still there — he was. He was in his army uniform, wearing his khaki cap, and he didn’t look a day older than when he had left for the war. She looked at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. In comparison, with her grey hair and her dull skin, she looked so old. She was overwhelmed with self-pity and embarrassment.

Smoothing out her dress, Mum walked out the back door and toward Uncle Rangiora. As she approached, he stood up, took off his cap and smiled at her — it didn’t seem to matter at all that he was still so young and she was so old.

‘Hello, brother,’ she said to him. ‘Why have you come to see me?’

His eyes were twinkling as he gave a deep, grave bow. ‘I’ve been thinking about you, sister,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time since we had a waltz.’

He opened his arms in invitation and, with a laugh of pure joy, she stepped into them.

After the waltz, Uncle Rangiora bowed again and left my mother standing alone in the sunlight. As he did so, a brown bird flew past her, heading after him, and she watched it as it sped across the sky.

My father didn’t know about Uncle Rangiora’s visit until he returned from Waituhi; he had been shifting cattle from the hill paddock to the flat in preparation for the trucks that would come the next morning to take them to the saleyards. When he arrived home he found my mother speaking on the telephone. There was something different about her, something radiant.

When Mum hung up, Dad asked her, ‘Who have you been talking to?’

‘I’ve been making enquiries,’ she answered. ‘First of all I rang the Returned Servicemen’s Association and then the army at Waiouru and the Maori Battalion Association in Wellington. I wanted to know when they were making their next visit to the Commonwealth war graves in Egypt and the Middle East.’

‘What for?’ Dad asked, puzzled. He could tell that Mum had a bee in her bonnet about something.

‘I want to visit Rangiora’s grave,’ Mum answered. ‘The Battalion aren’t going until next year though, so it looks like you and I will have to make the trip by ourselves. I’ve just asked the travel agent to book our trip for us. He wants us to go into town to see him and to have our photos taken for our passports.’

My father was seventy-seven, and he was waiting to have a replacement hip operation. He didn’t think Mum was serious but when she said, ‘We’re going and that’s that,’ he tried stonewalling. ‘I better have my operation first,’ he said.

Once Mum has made up her mind about something, however, nothing can stop her. She’s always been strong-willed and even though she loves my dad there are moments when, if he gets in her way, he’d better watch out. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘Wikitoria can come with me,’ referring to one of my sisters, ‘and you can stay home.’

My mother wanted to go to Tunisia because Uncle Rangiora had been killed there on 26 March 1943, at Point 201, Tebaga Gap. He had been a member of C Company, part of the platoon led by Second Lieutenant Ngarimu as they tried to take the German-held position. Twenty-two Battalion soldiers, including Ngarimu and Uncle Rangiora, were killed that day.

Not only was Mum strong-willed but, when she made up her mind, she moved really fast. Once she’d had her discussion with Dad she rang Wikitoria and told her to meet her at the travel agent’s the next morning. Satisfied that she was getting somewhere, she went to have a shower and prepare for bed. While she was in the shower, Dad rang me up in Wellington to try to get me to talk some sense into her.

‘She’s much too old to go travelling to the other side of the world,’ Dad said. ‘And how is Wikitoria going to get somebody to look after her fish and chip shop? Hoha, your mother, hoha.’

I knew that there was no way of stopping Mum. Once she had the bit between her teeth she was off and away. Uncle Rangiora had been her favourite brother. He was just two years older than her and, while they were growing up, he looked out for her; he loved taking her to swim down at the local river and together they would dive for beautiful white river stones. Even when he was a young man and had girlfriends, he and Mum were still as close as ever. Whenever church dances were held at Tokomaru Bay, Uncle Rangiora always saved the last waltz for her. There was a photograph of Mum and Uncle Rangiora taken just before he went to war — Mum always had it on her dressing table. In the photo, Uncle Rangiora was a handsome, laughing, cavalier boy; my mother was a slip of a girl in a pretty white dress, holding him as if she never wanted to let him go.

When Uncle Rangiora was killed, Mum was inconsolable. However, life goes on and, after the war ended, she moved to Gisborne to stay with her sister, Mattie, and worked as a shedhand in various shearing gangs. Dad was a shearer — that’s how they met. But she never forgot Uncle Rangiora, who had been buried in the Commonwealth war cemetery at Sfax, Tunisia. For as long as I can remember, every year without fail, Mum has walked in to The Gisborne Herald office and placed the same notice in the In Memoriam column:

To my brother, Private Rangiora Wharepapa, killed in action in Tunisia, 1943. Sadly missed, never forgotten. Your sister, Aroha.

Of course my sisters, brothers and I knew that Dad would never let Mum go to Tunisia without him. I was not surprised when Wikitoria telephoned to tell me, ‘Well, as usual, there’s no Judy without Punch.’ Apparently, Dad had shown up at the travel agent’s on his truck just when Wiki and Mum had almost completed the arrangements for the trip and were handing over a cheque for the deposit.

‘You can go back to your fish and chip shop, Wikitoria,’ Dad said to my sister. ‘How will that husband of yours cope without you to boss him around?’ He turned to the travel agent, a nice young boy named Donald. ‘My name is Tom Mahana and I’m going to Tunisia with Mrs Mahana.’

Mum looked at Dad askance. ‘With your bad hip you’ll be a nuisance,’ she told him. ‘Look at you! You can’t get around anywhere without a walking stick.’

‘And look at you,’ Dad retorted. ‘You’re an old woman, or have you forgotten? You’ve never been able to find your way around without my help, so how do you think you’ll manage when you go overseas?’

‘You’ll slow me down,’ Mum answered defensively. ‘It’s a long way to go with a lot of connections to catch. I don’t want to miss the planes.’

‘Your wife is right,’ Donald said, pursing his lips. ‘If you have hip trouble you’ll have enormous difficulties.’

Dad was in no mood for an argument. Today was the cattle sales and he should have been there. ‘We won’t miss any planes,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am? I may have to use a walking stick but I’m not entirely hopeless.’

‘And I’m not clever enough to get to Tunisia with Wikitoria, is that it?’ Mum asked. She looked at Donald, who was really only the meat in the sandwich. ‘You know,’ she confided in him, ‘when my husband asked me to marry him I didn’t want to because he was so much older than me. But I thought, “Better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave.” I never realised, that when men get older it doesn’t matter what their age is. They’re all hopeless.’

Donald excused himself while Mum and Dad continued their argument, but eventually Dad got his way. After all, the money for the trip was coming from their joint account, so that was that.

Now I have to admit that the idea of the trip would have been much easier on the family’s nerves if Mum and Dad had been flying on a, well, English-speaking airline. With an eye to economies, however, Mum had chosen to fly on Aerolineas Argentinas from Auckland to Buenos Aires to Barcelona to Paris, and thence to Tunisia by some airline that nobody had ever heard of.

‘How are you going to communicate?’ Wikitoria asked. ‘How are you going to find your way around when you won’t be able to read the signs?’

And, man oh man, the connections. When Mum sent me their itinerary I just about had a heart attack. ‘How do you know whether those terminals have air bridges?’ I said to her on the telephone. ‘How’s Dad going to get up and down all those stairs to and from the planes? And why does it look like the gates to your connecting flights are in other terminals? I’d better get our cousin Watene to fly from New York to Paris and go with you to Tunisia.’

‘And spoil our great adventure?’ she answered. ‘Don’t you dare! Anyhow, your father’s already in training.’

I’d heard all about Mum’s training from neighbours in Gisborne. ‘Oh, your poor father,’ they told me. ‘Your mother has been getting him up at six in the morning for a run around the block. We hadn’t realised she was so fit. She takes off like a rocket and your father hobbles after her, walking stick in hand. We can hear him complaining all the way about the new trainers she has bought for him. He says they’re too big and he doesn’t like the colour.’ True, my father has always been proud of his small feet and, well, aren’t all trainers white? ‘Does your mother listen to him?’ the neighbours asked. ‘No, she just keeps on yelling at him, “If you can’t keep up, you can stay at home.” By the time they finish their run your dad is absolutely exhausted.’

Exhausted or not, Dad managed to pass Mum’s fitness test. As the time for departure approached, they bought backpacks, got their passports and changed their money into pesos, francs and dinar. Mum gave Dad a haircut to save him the trouble of getting one while they were away. Three days before they were due to leave, she went up to Tolaga Bay where she and Uncle Rangiora had lived. There, she headed for the river where they had loved to swim.

What a nuisance. Mum had hoped to gather white stones from the riverbank but the best ones were at the bottom of the river, and the water was too deep to wade out to them. However, two Pakeha boys who were playing truant from school were jumping off branches into the water. She waved them over.

‘Yes, lady?’ they asked.

‘See those white stones?’ she said. ‘I’ve come to get some.’ She explained that she wanted to take them to Tunisia to put on Uncle Rangiora’s grave.

The young boys nodded and were soon duckdiving to the bottom of the river. Mum could see them, gliding like dreams through the sparkling water. When the boys returned, gasping, to the surface, they brought the white river stones to the bank. They soon had a good pile but they sorted through them, throwing some away. ‘They have to be perfect,’ they said to Mum, ‘You can’t take any old stones, can you, lady?’

‘No,’ Mum smiled. ‘Only the best.’

The boys dived again. They were enjoying themselves. While Mum waited for them she filled a small bottle with river water. Uncle Rangiora would like that — he probably missed the cool of the water there in the desert.

‘Thank you, boys,’ Mum said when the job had been done. She gave them a five-dollar note. ‘Don’t spend it all at once. I’m glad you played truant today.’

She left and gave them their river back.

At this point, my cousin Clarrie, her husband Chad and my Auntie Taina come into the picture. Somehow Clarrie found out about Mum and Dad going to Tunisia — probably from Wiki. Chad was American and, as it happened, they were planning with Auntie Taina to make one of their infrequent trips to catch up with his folks in Montana.

‘Don’t worry, cuz,’ Clarrie said to me on the phone from Wanganui, ‘We’ll meet them in Auckland. We’ve changed our bookings and are now on the same flight as Auntie and Uncle as far as Buenos Aires. When we get there, we’ll make sure they catch their connection to Barcelona.’ There was a slight tone of disapproval in her voice that I was letting Mum and Dad wander around in a dangerous world where they could get mugged or murdered, the poor things.

‘Thank you, Clarrie,’ I answered, trying to sound suitably chastised.

The day came for Mum and Dad’s departure. The terminal at Gisborne airport was crowded with my brothers and sisters, all trying to be brave. Mum sat stony-faced as they pleaded with her to change her mind; she was clutching her airline bag with its passport, money, river stones and bottle of river water, and turned a deaf ear to their words.

As for Dad, well, he was surrounded by his adoring grandchildren, all weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth as if they would never see him again.

The departure call was given. ‘Time to go,’ Mum said. ‘Come on, Dad.’ She walked out to the plane without a backward glance. As for Dad, he was the last to board. He had to hobble really fast to get there before the door closed, his new white trainers flashing across the tarmac.