I definitely wasn't very keen on reading Louise Erdrich's 'The Hollow Children' published in The New Yorker on November 28, 2022. But I had 30 minutes before coffee with C and I didn't feel like going to the cafe that early. Plonked myself on a random bench to read.
The story follows the journey of a school bus caught in a terrible blizzard in North Dakota in 1923. It's fictional, but there were so many real-life incidents, and an especially severe blizzard in some years. So in actual recorded history, the blizzard of 1923 was terrible. These natural disasters bring out a parent's deepest fears, and also that of caregivers, school bus drivers and such. The children themselves too.
The story began with the men at the town's Tabor Bar trading stories over beers. It led to them telling stories about their ancestors and people in the past and what they experienced. They got to the blizzard of 1923. Diz talked about an Uncle Ivek in the family who was a farmer, a part-time schoolteacher and one of the bus drivers taking the children to school.
An interview with Deborah Treisman at the magazine threw up the question of why the bus driver wrote down his experience,
The story begins with some guys swapping stories in a bar. Normally, you’d expect what follows to be a tall tale—a story that’s been handed down and changed a bit with each retelling. But, in this case, you tell us that Ivek, the bus driver, wrote down what had happened to him. Why is it important that there’s a written record?
Ivek records his experience because, for him, this was even more than a life-or-death drive in a blizzard. It was an unnerving plunge into another world. His experience of terror and pity, his tender desperation, and his overwhelming fear for the lives of his students make his story a timeless one for schoolteachers. My parents were schoolteachers. My oldest daughter is a schoolteacher. The idea that schoolteachers should even have to think of arming themselves? Unbearable. That is also why I wrote this story.
At 8am one April morning, Ivek took the wheel of the school bus and took his charges to school. He drove along the road till he saw a white churning mass. He couldn't outrun the blizzard. He slowed down to feel the tires along the road in the whiteout. He tried to get the children to sing and be calm. They even managed to split food in lunchboxes in the bus to share.
Wind sickness and hallucination are for real. In any physical endeavor. Nature reminds us that she will always triumph if we don't keep our wits about us. In that drive, Ivek thought he had driven the bus into the lake, and settled at the bottom. At this juncture, he saw that the children had turned hollow and translucent. Thankfully, that was not real. He got to the school safely, with all the children intact and not too afraid.
The chill in Ivek was far deeper than the fire could touch. The reality of the cold world beneath the ice was stronger than the warmth of the school. He turned away from the stove so the children wouldn’t see his tears. What was up and what was down? If he turned back, would the children still be warm and alive? Gritting their teeth in pain and happily whimpering as their numbed feet and fingers prickled to life? Or would they be frail blue human bubbles he’d failed to rescue? Would his son and his daughter be among them? Dissolved to froth? He closed his eyes. Again, he was down there with the fish darting in and out, lakeweed clogging the children’s mouths, each seat inhabited by a small, vanished life. And who was he? The driver or the one driven from existence by relentless snow? He reached—
Agnid pressed into his open hand a cup of snow she’d melted. He looked at her. She was sturdy. The water was hot, steeped with a piece of boiled wool she’d cut away from her coat. This was, she said, an old cure that her mother used for wind sickness, times when the mind could no longer bear the wind’s moans and mumbles and a person started hearing human voices.
He took the cup, drained it down. It tasted horrible, and he was cured.
Or, rather, he was better. For the drive would leave its mark upon him in a way that someone who had not seen those children, blue and hollow under the lake, would never understand. That was why he wrote it down.
No comments:
Post a Comment