The Family Frying Pan

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘What kind of fish?’ Professor Slotinowitz demands to know.

  ‘Shhh!’ we all chorus, a rudeness for which we must be forgiven because the professor is such a know-all sort of a person that sometimes in the name of good manners we are forced to be rude to him. Only Olga Zorbatov is his equal in the clumsy-remarks department and you’ll hear some more about her later.

  Mr Mendelsohn blushes. ‘Alas, I must beg your pardon, Professor. I know nothing of the kinds of fish and cannot tell a sardine from a cod.’

  ‘Fish will do nicely, Mr Mendelsohn,’ I say kindly and then turn to the professor and address him quite sharply. ‘Thank you very much, Professor Sloti-know-all-o-witz, the fish mentioned in Mr Mendelsohn’s story have gills and tails and silver scales and that is quite enough to know about them!’ I turn back and nod to Mr Mendelsohn to continue:

  Well, one day, not long after first sunlight, when the boats had been out no more than two hours, they were seen returning to shore.

  The women mending nets, baking bread and tending to their children, came running down to the water’s edge to see whatever could have happened to bring their menfolk home so soon.

  They watched as all the small boats converged on one boat and the men jumped out into the shallow waves. They were lifting something from one of the boats and crowded around the burden as though anxious to share in the pride and glory of their catch. They waded up onto the wet sand and then they parted to show four men carrying a mermaid.

  The mermaid’s silver tail was flapping in great agitation, changing colour with every twitch so that the women were forced to shade their eyes from the furious flashing brilliance. The expression on her face showed clearly that she was not in the least pleased and the sounds she made were not unlike the mewing of a newborn kitten, not at all elegant, and contrasting rather badly with her astonishing beauty.

  Now everyone knows what a mermaid looks like, but few people have actually been close enough to one to see what a truly beautiful creature she is. This mermaid had perfectly scalloped scales that changed to every colour in the spectrum at her slightest move, and which graduated from the size of a large silver coin at her waist to less than a small child’s pinkie nail where her tail fanned out.

  The skin above her waist was, in appearance, completely human, unblemished and as soft to the touch as the ermine lining of the Tsar’s coronation crown. Around her neck the mermaid wore a perfect string of blue pearls. Her wet hair hung in swirls to her shoulders, dark as midnight, framing a milk-white oval face into which were set eyes of a luminous green that shone with the fire of cut emeralds. Where it might be supposed her nose would be petite with perhaps the slightest upturn to complement such a sublime face, it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was somewhat imperious, a trifle too large, a commanding nose, a nose for a princess, no, not a princess, more like a queen. Her lips were generous and shaped like a cupid’s bow and, while she seemed in no mood to laugh, the glimpse of her teeth allowed by her angry mewing suggested they were as perfect as South Sea pearls.

  Mr Mendelsohn clears his throat. ‘There remains only the delicate matter of…’ He begins to blush furiously, clearing his throat again and then coughing into his fist. He looks over at Anya for help but when he sees her feeding his baby son, the infant’s tiny greedy mouth sucking and smacking on her wet nipple, he takes courage.

  ‘Her, er… breasts!’ His voice is hardly above a whisper. ‘They were perfectly shaped cones of sheer delight, rounded like the crescent moon and each crowned with a small rosebud.’

  ‘Tush! Mammaries and nipples!’ the professor snorts. ‘There isn’t the least thing romantic about such female appendages! Cows have them in any number, sows too, cats and dogs and stoats and weasels! Udders give me the shudders and tits give me the…’ He pauses. ‘Well, anyway, it rhymes!’ He points to the little violinist. ‘You play a commendable violin, Mendelsohn, but you tell a most improbable tale.’

  The professor rises slowly, his hand on his rheumatic hip, and, leaning on his walking stick, he starts to walk from the fire, then pauses and turns back. ‘If it were my story and I were you, Mendelsohn, I’d slice your mermaid neatly in half, make a damned good fish pie out of the bottom half and use the top half as the prow of a sailing ship, which I’d sail straight over the horizon all the way to America!’

  The professor glares at me for a moment as though challenging me to reprove him again. ‘No offence, Mrs Moses, but we need schemers not dreamers to get us out of this mess! The murder story Anya told last night was exactly what we needed to whet the appetite! A nice bit of chicken-soup revenge to lighten the burden of our journey out of Russia! To use a fishy metaphor, I would rather go hungry tonight than listen a moment longer to this load of codswallop! Good night to you all!’ Then he stomps off, snorting like an old rhinoceros into the night.

  I must say it took a lot of encouragement and not a little cajoling to get Mr Mendelsohn back to his story of the Feast of Pearls. And to tell the truth, we were to regret our efforts, for once he got started it was much of the same again. The artist in Mr Mendelsohn forbade him to miss a single detail. The colours and shapes of the clothes on the washing line of a house they passed carrying the mermaid back to the village, a fish hawk eyeing them balefully from the top of a tree, a brief dog fight, two black and red beetles mating on a tropical leaf. And, so much more, until the turnips, potatoes and cabbage in The Family Frying Pan were overcooked and still we hadn’t come to the Feast of Pearls. It was going to be a long, long night and I could see everyone was beginning to envy the professor’s decision to go to bed, even though they would miss the evening meal in the process.

  I proposed that we stop to eat and then allow Mr Mendelsohn to continue. Who was to know that a man who spoke so seldom had all those words in a great reservoir inside his head? But they were there all right, a lifetime of unspoken observations which now bubbled over the dam wall in his brain and caused a verbal flood that overwhelmed us all. By the time he had completed his story all but Anya and myself had long since fallen asleep beside the fire.

  For the sake of a neat ending I will try to tell you the rest of the story as quickly as possible. The mermaid proved to be not such a good idea after all. For a start the village possessed only the mikvah bath tub, that is the bath used by the women for ritual cleansing when their time of the month came, and she took possession of it. Moreover she had the most enormous appetite and consumed a large portion of the fish brought in every night. Her mewing never seemed to stop except when she sang.

  Now, if you believe in the legend that mermaids lure lonely sailors to their doom on the rocks with their beautiful singing, forget already that theory. According to Mr Mendelsohn, the opposite is true, the sound is so raucous that the sailors, fleeing with their hands over their ears, are unable to steer the boat, which then crashes willy-nilly onto the nearest available rocks.

  Well, to cut a long story short, the men in the village soon saw their families going hungry and, of course, they decided to throw the mermaid back into the sea. But that’s where the trouble started. Happily housed in the village mikvah, fed like a queen every day, the mermaid had no intention of leaving. So when the men came to take her back to the sea she let out a single high-pitched sound that popped the eardrums of the six fishermen allocated the task. This caused a great consternation in the village until someone pointed out that since these six good men were permanently deaf they could transport the mermaid back to the ocean without fear. But when they entered the small room where the bathtub stood, the mermaid flashed her emerald eyes, and the rays coming from them were so fierce that the six fishermen were instantly blinded.

  In desperation the villagers decided to starve the mermaid, but soon after she missed her first meal she began to sing. The sound was so awful that small children started to vomit, dogs went crazy, chasing their own tails and yowling, and men and women buried their heads in the soft sand or dived underwater, so that they might experience a few moments
of relief. Soon they capitulated and gave the mermaid an entire day’s catch.

  This was the state of affairs when, one evening, Mr Mendelsohn found himself tuning his violin under the window where the mermaid was housed.

  Now you will agree that the tuning of a violin can be a most unpleasant experience for the human ear, but not so, it turned out, to the ear of a mermaid. After a few moments of catgut scraping, the mermaid’s face appeared at the window, and it was obvious she greatly liked what she heard.

  Mr Mendelsohn, seeing her pleasure, played a few perfect notes on the violin, whereupon the mermaid’s emerald eyes grew dark and her expression showed her displeasure.

  So Mr Mendelsohn followed with a few strokes of the bow that sounded like a rooftop caterwauling and, at once, the mermaid clapped her hands in glee. Using every discordant note he could summon, the little violinist set to playing and the mermaid began to splash and cavort in the mikvah tub until she couldn’t contain her pleasure a moment longer. She leapt from the bathtub out of the window to pirouette on the very end of her wonderful fishy tail, which flashed and gyrated as she danced in a frenzy of delight to the terrible screeching and squawking and scraping of the violin.

  Instantly Mr Mendelsohn made for the shoreline with the mermaid dancing behind him. When he reached the water’s edge he continued until only his shoulders and the violin were free of the waves, and the mermaid, as though in a trance, followed him.

  Once in the water she began to swim in a circle around him, sometimes rising out of the water and leaping joyously in an arch over his head. It was plain to see that she had fallen hopelessly in love. Suddenly she stopped and, with her tail dancing on the crest of a wave, she took the string of pearls from about her neck and placed them over Mr Mendelsohn’s head and kissed him.

  It was a kiss so sweet that Mr Mendelsohn forgot that he was meant to play terrible rasping sounds and, quite transported by the mermaid’s kiss, started to play the Brahms Violin Concerto. The mermaid was so horrified by this sublime music that she covered her pretty ears and dived deep down into the waves and was never seen again.

  I looked at Mr Mendelsohn and shook my head. It was late and I would need to be up at dawn to bake bread in the pan for the next day’s journey. ‘So tell me, Mr Mendelsohn, I do not wish to be nosy but you have straw stuffed in your boots, half a dozen patches in your britches and your elbows stick out of your overcoat, what happened to the mermaid’s pearls?’ I admit it was a bit forward and no doubt a little cheeky, some might say even rude, but it was well past my bedtime and I was too weary to mind my manners.

  Anya opened her blouse and there, draped about her neck, was a magnificent double string of pearls which glowed in the moonlight. ‘There are ninety-nine only,’ Mr Mendelsohn explained. ‘One pearl I took and sold so that the fishing village could buy new fishing nets, and a boat with a donkey engine and have a great feast, the Feast of Pearls, to celebrate the departure of the mermaid.’

  ‘So, you are a rich man already, Mr Mendelsohn? Tell me, please, why do you travel with us? You could take a train and travel first class and eat three meals a day and smoke a Cuban cigar, and be out of Russia in three weeks, never mind nobody!’

  Mr Mendelsohn sighed. ‘I do not care for money, Mrs Moses, only music and love and a desire for freedom. I have all three of these treasures in our little travelling group. When we get out of Russia, Anya and the baby and I will go to America, the land of the free, and there I will sell the pearls and buy the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where I will be the First Violin until the day I die.’

  THE PRINCESS TATIANA AND THE INDIAN MYNA BIRD

  Professor Slotinowitz is up early and comes upon me just as I am laying the second batch of small wheat loaves into the frying pan to bake. Five loaves already lie on their backs to cool on a small muslin cloth. We will eat them during the day’s journey and, with our evening meal, it is just sufficient to keep us from starvation. As for the rest, we hope always to come across a patch of wild berries, or an apple orchard with fruit on the ground from an overnight windfall.

  It is surprising what may be found in a summer and autumn landscape. Locusts have a nutty taste, but can only be eaten when the bitter-tasting head and the papery wings are removed. A clutch of birds’ eggs eaten raw is a gourmet discovery and fat grubs that live under the bark of fallen oaks and elms and lime trees are also delicious. The acorns we gather we grind for coffee and they can be eaten raw when there is nothing else. Roasted chestnuts are a forest delicacy, and all make life possible in the summer and autumn, but spring with all its bright promise yields very little to the hungry gatherer. Winter brings us nothing but the bitter cold.

  ‘Good morning, Professor,’ I call, not stopping to shake his hand, as my own is floury from kneading the bread dough.

  ‘Humph!’ he replies, clearing his throat. Then he adds, sotto voce, ‘I apologise, Mrs Moses.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ I ask, knowing, of course, but determined to make him suffer a little longer.

  ‘Last night, that stupid story, I could not contain myself.’

  ‘Not so stupid as it turns out,’ I say mysteriously, ‘but very interesting, Professor, you should have stayed for the end.’

  ‘Impossible! Dreamers have ruined my life. Impossible, ridiculous, impractical, stupid, irresponsible, selfish and thoughtless dreamers!’ he pauses and sniffs. ‘The bread smells good!’

  I cut a warm loaf in the centre and hand one half to the professor who had missed his meal when he’d stormed out during Mr Mendelsohn’s mermaid story. ‘It’s not extra, Professor, that is your ration for the day,’ I say firmly, then I point to the kettle bubbling on the fire. ‘There is coffee made from ground acorns. You have your own cup, yes?’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you, yes, yes, very good of you.’ He seems overly grateful as he produces an enamel mug from the pocket of his worn overcoat. I pour him a cup of the dark, bitter-tasting acorn coffee, which is often enough all there is to get us started on a cold morning.

  He takes his bread and coffee and seats himself on a fallen log. Then he reaches inside his coat and produces a knife and fork. A red bandanna also appears and he fluffs it in the air before arranging it neatly on his lap. Placing the small half-loaf on the cloth he commences to cut it into tiny squares and eat it as though it were a meal of sausage and potatoes. His manners are correct and come from the city, and he sits with a straight back as he chews each tiny square thoughtfully, as if it were the aforementioned sausages, or even the most delicate cut of beef or some other exquisite morsel.

  When the meal is completed I watch from the corner of my eye as he upturns the crumbs from the cloth on his lap into his cupped hand. Then he moves a small distance from the fire where he stands with his hand held out high above his head. It is still very early and the air is misty blue and not yet sharpened by sunlight. The professor’s breath is smoky as he stands perfectly still, a tall man with a pointed beard and glasses, every inch the mathematical genius, very much the great scholar.

  I continue to work, watching the bread and the coffee kettle and feeding twigs to the fire. I have half a mind to reprove him, even the smallest crumbs are treasures when you are hungry, and here the professor is holding the crumbs in the air and offering them to the wind as though he is carrying out some religious benediction.

  He is also making a soft, breathy whistling sound which could be a prayer, though I would never have thought him to be the praying type. So it is with some amazement when I see the first small bird alight on his hand and then, in a few moments, half a dozen more flutter down out of a clear blue sky and come to rest on his now overcrowded palm. They begin immediately to chirp and quarrel amongst themselves as they compete for his delicious offering.

  You could have knocked me down with a goose feather, but I told myself it was none of my business. You soon learn when you are travelling in a group to observe well but to remark little on the doings and affairs of the others.

  It takes the birds
no time at all to polish off the crumbs and so I wait for the professor’s next trick. These are not very substantial birds but every little bit makes a difference and the professor is, to say the least, a pretty poor scavenger and makes almost no contribution.

  The birds are now hopping on the old man’s shoulders and his head and all he has to do is pick them off one at a time, squeeze their heads between his thumb and forefinger and drop each in turn into his pocket. Today such a cruel thought would not occur to me, but I have a full belly and a warm bed to go to. Starvation is not a condition which calls for sentimentality.

  But the professor does no such thing and as each of the tiny creatures hops onto his hand he kisses the downy feathers and lifts them into the air to send them on their way. Soon all the birds are gone and the professor dusts his hands and strolls away as though nothing very unusual has occurred.

  The next batch of bread is now ready and I shake my head. How can someone be so smart and also so stupid? In the case of the professor of know-everything, a bird in the hand is just as useless as two in the bush. I sigh, there will be no flavour of meat in tonight’s offering.

  I had almost forgotten the incident with the birds when some weeks later the professor puts up his hand to tell a story so that we might choose the dish our potatoes, turnips and cabbage would become that night.

  That he should volunteer a story comes as a complete surprise. His demeanour on most nights is dismissive and, while he is not rude, it is easy to tell he is uninterested. Though with only the slightest encouragement he would expound one of his theories or explain how a steam train worked or a metal boat floated on water. He is not so much what you might call a storyteller as a fact-teller and seems totally uninterested in food.