The Storyteller Who Forgot the Ending

There was once a storyteller who travelled the villages of a wide dry country with a repertoire of about forty tales. He had told them for so long that he could tell any of them while thinking about something else — what he would eat that evening, whether the wheel on his cart needed greasing, whether the widow in the last village had truly meant the smile she gave him on his way out. His voice would do the tale. His mind was free.

His most famous story was one about a poor woodcutter, a talking crane, and a promise kept at great cost. He had told it eight hundred times. The children in every village knew the beats. They mouthed the crane's lines under their breath. The ending was well loved. The crane, revealed at last, flies away into the sunset, and the woodcutter — poorer than when the story began but strangely richer — walks home alone. It is a good ending. It always got a small, satisfied sigh from the crowd.

One evening, in a village he had not visited for a long time, he sat down by the fire with the usual crowd around him and began the tale. The children mouthed the crane's lines. The old people leaned back. He reached the moment where the crane spreads her wings, and he opened his mouth to deliver the ending he had delivered eight hundred times — and it was gone. Simply not there. He could see the shape of it, the way you can see the shape of a room in the dark, but the words themselves had walked out.

He paused. The pause went on longer than any pause should in a story. The children stopped mouthing. The old people leaned forward. A dog barked somewhere and then thought better of it.

He did what a professional does. He improvised.

'The crane spread her wings,' he said slowly, 'and she did not fly away. She turned back to the woodcutter, and she said one last thing to him, which I will tell you now, because you have been such a good audience.' The audience — a whole village who had also heard this story a hundred times — went very still, because this was not the ending they knew.

He had no idea what the crane would say. He was making it up in front of them. He said, because it was what came into his head, 'She said: I was not the gift. You were.' And then, because he had to end the story somehow, he said, 'And she flew, and the woodcutter walked home, and for the rest of his life he did not know whether the crane had meant that he had saved her, or that he had, in saving her, saved himself. And that not-knowing was the thing he took with him to the end of his days.'

There was a very long silence. Then the old people started nodding. Then a small child started crying, in the way children cry when they have felt something they do not yet have a word for. Then a woman at the back of the crowd began to clap, slowly, and everyone joined her, and the storyteller, who was as surprised as anyone, sat by the fire for a long time afterwards and did not eat.

That version of the story travelled with him after that. He told the old ending sometimes, out of loyalty. But more and more he told the new one, and the new one, because he had made it under pressure with the whole village watching, was better. It had cost him something to say it. The crowd could feel that.

There is a moral here for anyone who has been doing the same work for a long time. What you have polished, you can also lose. What you lose, you sometimes have to remake in front of a live audience with your voice shaking. And the remade thing, if you are honest under the pressure, is often better than the polished one, because polish smooths a thing until it stops catching the light, and improvisation puts the roughness back.

If you are frightened that you have forgotten your ending — the plan, the answer, the line you were about to deliver — do not panic. Say what actually comes. The room is quieter than you think, and more generous than you fear, and the ending you make from that quiet may turn out to be the one you were supposed to tell all along.