Рох Кэрриер. Рассказы. Roch Carrier. Stories

The Nun Who Returned to Ireland

After my first day of school I ran back to the house, holding out my reader.

'Mama, I learned how to read!' I announced.

'This is an important day,' she replied; 'I want your father to be here to see.'

We waited for him. I waited as I'd never waited before. And as soon as his step rang out on the floor of the gallery, my first reader was open on my knees and my finger was pointing to the first letter in a short sentence.

'Your son learned to read today,' my mother declared through the screen door. She was as excited as I.

'Well, well!' said my father. 'Things happen fast nowadays. Pretty soon, son, you'll be able to do like me — read the newspaper upside down in your sleep!'

'Listen to me!' I said.

And I read the sentence I'd learned in school that day, from Sister Brigitte. But instead of picking me up and lifting me in his arms, my father looked at my mother and my mother didn't come and kiss her little boy who'd learned to read so quickly.

'What's going on here?' my father asked.

'I'd say it sounds like English,' said my mother. 'Show me your book.' (She read the sentence I'd learned to decipher.) 'I'd say you're reading as if you were English. Start again.'

I reread the short sentence.

'You're reading with an English accent!' my mother exclaimed.

'I'm reading the way Sister Brigitte taught me.'

'Don't tell me he's learning his own mother tongue in English,' my father protested.

I had noticed that Sister Brigitte didn't speak the way we did, but that was quite natural because we all knew that nuns don't do anything the way other people do: they didn't dress like everybody else, they didn't get married, they didn't have children and they always lived in hiding. But as far as knowing whether Sister Brigitte had an English accent, how could I? I'd never heard a single word of English.

Over the next few days I learned that she hadn't been born in our village; it seemed very strange that someone could live in the village without being born there, because everyone else in the village had been born in the village.

Our parents weren't very pleased that their children were learning to read their mother tongue with an English accent. In whispers. they started to say that Sister Brigitte was Irish — that she hadn't even been born in Canada. Monsieur Cassidy, the undertaker, was Irish too, but he'd been born in the village, while Sister Brigitte had come from Ireland.

'Where's Ireland?' I asked my mother.

'It's a very small, very green little country in the ocean. far, far away.'

As our reading lessons proceeded I took pains to pronounce the vowels as Sister Brigitte did, to emphasize the same syllables as she; I was so impatient to read the books my uncles brought back from their far-off colleges. Suddenly it was important for me to know.

'Sister Brigitte, where's Ireland?' She put down her book.

'Ireland is the country where my parents were born, and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. And I was born in Ireland too. I was a little girl in Ireland. When I was a child like you I lived in Ireland. We had horses and sheep. Then the Lord asked me to become his servant...'

'What does that mean?'

'The Lord asked me if I wanted to become a nun. I said yes. So then I left my family and I forgot Ireland and my village.'

'Forgot your village?'

I could see in her eyes that she didn't want to answer my question.

'Ever since, I've been teaching young children. Some of the children who were your age when I taught them are grandparents now, old grandparents.'

Sister Brigitte's face, surrounded by her starched coif, had no age; I learned that she was old, very old, because she had been a teacher to grandparents.

'Have you ever gone back to Ireland?'

'God didn't want to send me back.'

'You must miss your country.'

'God asked me to teach little children to read and write so every child could read the great book of life.'

'Sister Brigitte, you're older than our grandparents! Will you go back to Ireland before you die?'

The old nun must have known from my expression that death was so remote for me I could speak of it quite innocently, as I would speak of the grass or the sky. She said simply:

'Let's go on with our reading. School children in Ireland aren't as disorderly as you.'

All that autumn we applied ourselves to our reading; by December we could read the brief texts Sister Brigitte wrote on the blackboard herself, in a pious script we tried awkwardly to imitate; in every text the word Ireland always appeared. It was by writing the word Ireland that I learned to form a capital I.

After Christmas holidays Sister Brigitte wasn't at the classroom door to greet us; she was sick. From our parents' whispers we learned that Sister Brigitte had lost her memory. We weren't surprised. We knew that old people always lose their memories and Sister Brigitte was an old person because she had been a teacher to grandparents.

Latein January, the nuns in the convent discovered that Sister Brigitte had lefther room. They looked everywhere for her, in all the rooms and all theclassrooms. Outside, a storm was blowing gusts of snow and wind; you couldn'tsee Heaven or earth, as they said. Sister Brigitte, who had spent the last fewweeks in her bed, had fled into the storm. Some men from the village spottedher black form in the blizzard: beneath her vast mantle she was barefoot. Whenthe men asked her where she was going, Sister Brigitte replied in English thatshe was going home, to Ireland.