A Simple Tale – Claire Messud (2001) 92 pages

A Simple Tale is the first of two novellas collected under the title The Hunters. It’s my first experience of Claire Messud’s writing and it has definitely made me keen to explore her further.

The tale is that of Maria, a Ukrainian refugee who was taken to the labour camps during the Second World War, before escaping to Canada. Once there, she worked for various people as domestic help, and in her old age there is only one client left:

“The old woman, her fluffed hair pressed flat at the side of her head, her ravaged hands fumbling with the blankets, hauled herself up and swung her feet to the floor. The bed was high – it was Mrs Ellington’s marriage bed – and Mrs Ellington was small: her feet dangled a few inches above the carpet, sweeping, like divining rods, in search of her slippers. Maria bent and slid the pink mules one at a time over Mrs Ellington’s scaly insteps.”

We learn of how Maria and her husband Lev built a new life with their son Radek, who wants to be known as Rod. It is a reminder that no-one’s tale is simple and you never know what someone carried with them:

“She marvelled, too, that no visible mark of her own life was apparent upon her (excepting, perhaps, her silver incisors; but she did not, at such events, have any call to reveal them), that these men and women could not smell, from her olive skin, the stink of the camps (of camp upon camp) nor detect the ache of nights spent in German ditches.”

It’s also a tale of the silences and misunderstandings between generations, compounded by the traumas of war. Maria cannot understand her son’s choice of wife and he cannot understand her relentless drive to be busy, and for domestic order and cleanliness:

“It delighted her to think that she passed through the house with as little disturbance as Lev’s ghost. It was a complex satisfaction: that of not wasting, to be sure, the satisfaction bred into her in her parents cabbage-scented cottage in far away Gulyaypole; but also that of keeping safe, untainted, the life, the permanence, that she and Lev had built together over their Canadian years.”

A Simple Tale is not a sad one despite the realities it portrays. It is a tale of resilience and endurance and of indomitability, particularly of women. It is about aging and acceptance, and of sisterhood – unasked for, unexpected, but there all the same. I really loved it.  

“In their different ways, Maria realised, both she and Mrs Ellington will becoming invisible. And perhaps, then, she decided, although not without a grim sense of resignation, they would doomed to each other, perhaps that was the truth: bound, in spite of themselves, to illuminate one another and to help each other to cast some semblance of a shadow.”