The Family Frying Pan

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘No more!’ I cried. ‘We have seen enough. You may take your myna bird away with you. We do not need a bird who can sing like all the other birds, we have a Russian princess who can do that!’

  Tatiana looked dismayed. ‘But we have hardly begun, Professor!’

  ‘Princess, we have lost thirty gold coins, not quite a king’s ransom, but the better part of my monthly budget for buying birds.’

  ‘But I told you, Papa will pay! I have my own money, we haven’t challenged the bird to any maths!’

  ‘Shall we say sixty gold coins, double what you have already bet?’ the Oriental man, whom I was beginning greatly to dislike, suggested. My heart beat faster as I observed the pile of gold coins on the table in front of him. To add sixty more would take my entire budget for the summer.

  ‘No, no, I really must refuse.’ I looked for help from the accountant but he avoided my eyes and, turning his back on me, reached over for a piece of Turkish delight.

  ‘Oh, just one more, please, Professor, just one truly hard one.’

  The sultan’s brother’s hand rose. ‘The rules for mathematics are different. I will give you a problem and then you will compete with the bird to see who can most quickly solve it.’ He pointed to me. ‘So that there is no suggestion of prior knowledge, that is to say, the bird has already been taught the answer, you, Professor, shall set the second problem.’

  I shrugged my shoulders and counted out sixty gold coins from the velvet bag on my lap, and when I had laid them before me I knew that only two more coins sat in the bottom of the bag. I had spent four years’ salary for a mathematics professor at the Moscow Academy where I had once taught.

  ‘Sixteen multiplied by 29.5, divided by 11.5, subtract six and multiply by 77,’ the sultan’s brother announced.

  It was child’s play. If this was the sort of maths the myna bird could do we would win all our money back and all that of the odious Oriental. Tatiana would make short work of such a problem, in thirty seconds or less. The seconds ticked by and the bird hopped in what appeared to be some agitation from one perch to another. ‘Two thousand, six hundred and ninety-eight point three four, do you wish the continuing fractions?’ the princess shouted triumphantly.

  ‘The princess is very clever,’ the sultan’s brother said quietly and pushed all the coins back over to my side of the table. I must say I was profoundly relieved. Princess Tatiana was capable of much better and it was my turn to create a complex equation. ‘Shall it be double again?’ I asked, looking at the one hundred and twenty gold coins in front of me.

  ‘Of course,’ the Oriental said, though I thought with a little less enthusiasm.

  I set a new problem much more difficult than the one set by the sultan’s brother, in fact, one which was at the extreme limit of Tatiana’s capacity. It would take her two minutes or more of mental calculations and I sat back to wait, thinking of the fortune we were about to earn. But in less than twenty seconds the bird had the answer, which, by the way, was far less than I would have required to calculate the answer to such a problem myself.

  The sultan’s brother rose from his chair and leaned over and drew the golden coins over to his side of the table and swept them into a leather satchel. ‘There is a matter of one hundred and twenty gold coins to come from you, Professor,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I cannot pay you now, you will have to take a promissory note.’

  I turned to the accountant, who shrugged and wrote out the note, insisting that I authorise it with my signature.

  ‘Thank you,’ the sultan’s brother said. He rose from the table and kicked the servant who lay asleep at his feet. The little man seemed to wake up with a start and scrambled to his feet and from his pocket took a handful of corn which he scattered on the floor of the cage. Then he stood to rigid attention beside the gilded cage as the Indian myna bird pecked busily at the granules of corn. The sultan’s brother bowed to us all, last of all to Princess Tatiana.

  ‘You have been most hospitable and I thank you. As a token of my esteem and that of the Queen of Persia you may ask the royal myna bird any question you like about your own future, for, in addition to its other talents, the bird possesses the gift of prophecy as well.’

  ‘Please, we have had enough, I must ask you to leave at once,’ I said sternly.

  The sultan’s brother looked down his imperious nose at me. ‘Be calm, Professor, there is no wager involved in this.’

  ‘Any question?’ the princess asked excitedly, she seemed not in the least concerned at losing so much money.

  The sultan’s brother nodded.

  ‘About the future?’

  Again the sultan’s brother agreed.

  ‘Will I grow up and meet a handsome prince and live happily ever after?’ Princess Tatiana asked.

  We all looked to the bird, which had suddenly and in great agitation flown up to its perch and commenced to chirp in the familiar and not very pleasant manner of an Indian myna bird. The chirping grew most agitated but it was no more than that, the chirp of an Indian myna bird, and not a single vowel or consonant that might be mistaken for a human language escaped from its beak as an answer to the question the princess had asked. Then it did a last frantic flutter and dropped dead, falling off its perch to the bottom of the cage, its over-large yellow legs pointing straight upwards.

  ‘A terrible omen!’ Mrs Zorbatov exclaims. ‘It dropped dead, the bird died, can’t you see? It is the prophecy, the Princess Tatiana is going to die!’

  We all look at each other in horror. While we have no time for the Tsar, me least of all with my whole village destroyed and my people killed by his Cossacks, we nevertheless wish no harm on the beautiful Princess Tatiana, who seems to us the first intelligent Russian royal since Peter the Great.

  ‘That was some bird!’ I say at last. ‘Some schmarty-pants bird!’

  The professor shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t the myna bird who was smart, it was the professor who was stupid! You see it was the Oriental gentleman’s servant, he was the smart one, a brilliant mimic and, as well, a ventriloquist not to mention a mathematical genius.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well what about the bird dropping dead like that, then?’ Olga Zorbatov challenges. Like all of us she wants the Indian myna bird to stay smart so the story won’t lose its mystery.

  The professor sighs. ‘The corn was poisoned, the corn the servant threw into the bottom of the cage killed the bird.’

  The remainder of the story I shall tell, for it was the reason the professor was included into our group of refugees fleeing from the Tsar’s secret police.

  Like most young women, the princess had become over-excited at the prospect of the competition and when the professor visited the royal exchequer to claim the money she had promised his request was promptly denied, and he was confronted with the promissory note he had signed. When the young accountant and all the other witnesses were called in, they, for fear of becoming implicated, denied that the princess had agreed that the money be used for gambling purposes and that she would repay it from her own pocket. As for the princess herself, she simply wasn’t asked if she had authorised the professor to act as he did. Despite his pleas for her to appear on his behalf, this too was denied to him.

  The professor was arrested and thrown into jail for the fraudulent use of the Tsar’s money. He was sentenced to twenty years in Siberia but escaped from the train taking him there when a guard shook him awake in the early hours of the morning. The engine had stopped to take on water. ‘Go,’ the guard whispered, pushing the professor off the train, ‘the Princess Tatiana can do no more than this for you, if you are caught you will be immediately shot!’

  Little did we know as we sat around the fire that night that not many years later the Tsar and the Tsarina, Prince Alexei, the haemophiliac heir to the throne, the Princess Tatiana and her four sisters would all be shot, murdered by the Reds in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

  Maybe the corn was poisoned, maybe not. Maybe by dropping dead, that cl
ever Indian myna bird was trying to tell the Princess Tatiana something after all?

  THE BANQUET OF PAST SUFFERING AND FUTURE JOY

  Olga Zorbatov is a seamstress, or so she says, though she has not been observed with so much as a needle and thread in her possession since coming to us.

  Her only interests seem to be in matters both gastronomical and verbal, for she is constantly preoccupied with food and chatter. She is also most contrary; no matter what one says, Mrs Z feels compelled to take the opposite viewpoint.

  If we are fortunate enough to have sufficient beetroot to make a nice borscht soup and someone observes that it is lacking in a little salt, then Mrs Z will immediately declare it to be too salty for her taste.

  She has grown quite thin, which is only a manner of speaking for she is still a big woman but much trimmed down and even more healthy than when she first joined our group.

  How very fat she was at that time, with double and even treble chins. A person shouldn’t call another person fat, that is, if such a thing can be avoided, but with Olga Zorbatov, believe me, fat was a compliment compared to what she was. She would wobble like a great jelly as she walked and we all feared she would slow us down, for she had the greatest trouble keeping up and often lagged behind the professor who uses a walking stick and suffers from arthritis in his hip.

  But she is not without courage and, besides, she has a strange gift. She is a remarkable scavenger and, most days, seems able to prophesy where a little food may be found. Quite how she does this is a mystery and we are often forced to shake our heads in amazement.

  We will be travelling on the road and in the distance and to our left might be the dark line of a pine forest. Mrs Z will stop suddenly as though she is sniffing the air.

  ‘Mushrooms!’ she will announce. Then she will turn to the children. ‘Take a big basket, look carefully under the trunks of the larger trees, brush away the dead pine needles, you’ll find them there.’

  If our resident mushroom expert, Anya Mendelsohn, is feeding her baby and won’t accompany them, the children will go reluctantly, kicking at stones and looking back over their shoulders. Kids do not like entering dark woods and there is always something scary about a pine forest. But sure enough, they will return in an hour or two with much excitement and present me with a basket brimful of wild mushrooms.

  That is the strange thing. She seems to know in the morning before we set out whether there will be extra food to find during the day’s long journey. She will point in a direction when we are all ready to set out for the day, and we know now to obey even if the path seems at first to be quite wrong. Soon enough we’ll come to a wayside apple orchard with windblown fruit scattered under the trees.

  Or she might point to a swamp and say, ‘Goose eggs!’ and the children will scamper off and return several minutes later with a clutch of large eggs. Occasionally she’ll point to a green waterhole in a river almost dried up in the summer heat. ‘Fish over there and biting!’ she will announce. Sure enough, Mr Petrov, the blacksmith, who is the resident fisherman, will soon land a fat carp or two for our dinner.

  It is quite uncanny, especially as Mrs Z knows nothing of country matters and can’t tell a farm goose from a Moscovy duck unless it is already plucked and dressed by the butcher. I once asked her how she came to have this second sight for the whereabouts of food, which I must point out she lacks in everything else and is much more likely to rush in like a bull in a china shop than to be in the least sensitive to the feelings of the others.

  ‘I see it in the stars,’ she said. Seeing my bemused expression, she continued. ‘Since the death of my husband, God rest his soul, I sleep little at night.’ This was true enough, I would often wake in the night to find her walking about, muttering away and gesticulating to the night sky. ‘I watch the sky and speak to my husband, Sergei, who tells me in what direction we must travel in the morning to find a morsel to eat.’ Mrs Z looked at me, one eyebrow slightly raised. ‘Last night Sergei was riding on the tail of Pisces and today Mr Petrov caught three fat fish!’

  I have mentioned before that it is best to mind your own business when you are travelling with others and so I nodded my head as though this revelation was a perfectly satisfactory explanation. I may be a country girl but I am not stupid. If Mrs Z is a little soft in the head what does it matter? Who am I to question her astral conversations with her dead husband? Why should I care if he has his head stuck in the jaws of Leo the Lion, or rides on the tail of Pisces the Fish when the results are of such benefit to all of us? So I keep my mouth shut and say nothing to the others because now I know Olga Z is definitely crazy.

  So when she put up her hand to tell a story, given her passion for food and her verbal dexterity, her astral connections and her lively imagination, crazy or not, I anticipated a star performance. Little did I know how right I would be, though none of us could have suspected the strange tale she was about to tell.

  This is Olga Zorbatov’s story as told to us under the stars somewhere in Russia.

  ‘There are many ways to use an astrological chart,’ she begins, ‘and almost all have to do with personality. We are all born under an astrological sign and there are some people who believe that we are trapped within our signs. I presume all of you know nothing about astrology?’ She gives the professor a scathing look, ‘Although the professor is bound to think he knows it all!’

  Professor Slotinowitz shrugs, ‘Astronomy, my dear, a little. Of the witchcraft of astrology, I know nothing,’ he says in a mild and pleasant voice. I must say the professor is learning a lot in human relations, before he would have walked out for sure.

  Mrs Z gives him a malevolent look but, thank God, does not choose to quarrel with him and continues with her story. ‘Allow me to explain. The child born under the Leo on the Zodiac chart is said to be a natural leader. Someone born under the Scorpio sign is thought to have a sharp tongue and a peremptory manner. Taurus the Bull makes for one impetuous and unthinking, likely to tramp over people’s feelings. If you are born under the sign of Aries the Ram…’ Mrs Z pauses and looks a trifle embarrassed, ‘you are said to be good in the bedchamber.’

  This brings laughter from all of us. Then Mr Petrov, the blacksmith, who is responsible for the fine fish stew we are going to enjoy tonight, asks Mrs Z if she was born under the sign of Taurus.

  ‘How did you guess?’ she says, plainly surprised. Mrs Z seems confused when her remark causes a gale of laughter.

  Olga Zorbatov continues. ‘Now this would be very well if it worked, but how often do we find a Leo person as timid as a mouse and quite unable to make a decision? And a Scorpio who is completely unselfish and lives to be in the service of others? Or a Taurus like myself who is not in the least clumsy and by nature sensitive? Do you get the idea?’

  We all nod our heads.

  ‘Well, this apparent contradiction worried my husband, Sergei, who was a cook and also an astrologer with a growing reputation. “Olga, sweetheart?” he said to me one night as we dined on the roof of our small house at midnight under the stars. You see, he would come home late from where he worked as head chef in the kitchen of the Hotel Grande Rex in Moscow, which, as you must all know, is where only the highest of the Russian nobility wish to be seen dining. He would return home late from the steaming atmosphere of the great kitchen and want to partake of a meal at midnight in the open air under the stars. Though, of course, this was only possible in the summer.

  ‘“Yes, my beloved, what is it?” I replied.

  ‘“Look!” Sergei said. “How brightly Taurus the Bull shines tonight.”

  ‘I spread goose pâté on a small slice of fresh soda bread and poured vodka into the silver horn he loved to use as his goblet and handed both to him. “It burns bright for you, my beautiful husband,” I said.’

  ‘Taurus is never overly bright in the Moscow sky,’ the professor says suddenly.

  ‘So now already the Birdman of St Petersburg is telling this story?’ Olga Z asks, appealing t
o all of us.

  ‘On that particular night it burned bright, Professor!’ I interject hurriedly.

  ‘So, let me continue.’ Mrs Z turns to the professor. ‘With your permission, of course, Professor-of-little-brown-birds-that-make-a-fool-of-so-called-smart-men!’

  ‘We must have no more interruptions, please!’ I say sternly, using authority I don’t really have.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Moses,’ Olga Zorbatov says. ‘It is nice to know there is somebody civilised here! If you remember before I was so rudely interrupted, my husband was about to speak.’

  ‘Olga, sweetheart, I have a theory that heaven is the great kitchen of human possibilities, and that the stars are the cooking ingredients and the signs of the Zodiac are the dishes of the personality. We astrologers have it all wrong, people are not trapped within their astrological signs, it is rather more likely that if we are born under a sign that we can use the characteristics of that sign to effect good or evil on others. A Leo, for instance, can teach his children the principles of leadership, which is good, or he can be so adamant about being the leader that he can cow his family and rob them of initiative forever, which is bad. For instance, you, who are gentle as a lamb, are born under the sign of Taurus the Bull, but you do not choose to be impetuous and unthinking, which is bad, but steadfast, loyal and protective, which is good.’

  As he finished speaking, I picked out a gozin-nakh from a small silver platter and popped it into Sergei’s mouth. This small ball-shaped confection, you will all know of course, is made entirely of chopped nuts, honey and sugar. ‘You are so very clever, Sergei, when did you come upon this brilliant theory that the heavens are the great kitchen of human possibilities?’

  ‘By watching people eat. There is a saying among chefs that people are the food they eat. Watch what people eat and you will at once know a great deal about them.’

  ‘And what does this have to do with the stars?’ ‘Simple, if you change what they eat, you change what they are! If a woman has been completely dominated by her husband who is a Leo, the meat eater, she will be forced to eat too much meat and her diet must be immediately adjusted, because every time she eats meat she will feel much burdened by her husband’s personality.’