The Family Frying Pan

by Bryce Courtenay

  Oh, yes, I almost forgot the most important part. To amuse a young child with too much energy, who didn’t much care for the stilted movements of the waltz and the polite restraints of the polka, my dancing master taught me a little of acrobatics. A few backflips and standing somersaults and how to balance and walk on my hands. I think I would have liked to have learned ballet but my mother had strictly forbidden this for reasons of her own which she never explained to me.

  Eugene Wilenski came from a poor family and his brothers and sisters as well as his parents were acrobats and he too had been trained to the trapeze and gymnastics but was now a scholarship student at the academy and thought to be a promising dancer. I knew almost at once that my mind and my body could not be separated, and that the exhilaration of twisting and flipping in the air as though I were flying was the most wonderful experience I could possibly imagine. Eugene would demonstrate a tumble or a backflip and the timing required for a standing somersault, and in no time at all my supple nine-year-old body could make a fair replication of the movement and with a little practice soon perfect it. ‘One day I will teach you to fly, little Tamara,’ he would laugh. ‘To fly without fear and to walk the wire in the sky!’

  Of course, when my mother discovered me tumbling about and twisting in the air she was horrified and the young dancing master was immediately dismissed and replaced by an old man with a shiny bald pate and a dark waxed moustache curled up at the ends. I remember the last two centimetres of the moustache was white, and reminded me of a smug cat licking cream. I hated him from the first moment. He spoke French to me all the time, but with a simply atrocious Georgian accent and seemed immensely pleased with himself. I was also strictly forbidden to practise acrobatics, and a single backflip discovered by one of the servants and reported to my mother would result in me being sent to bed without supper.

  My mother also saw that Eugene Wilenski was expelled from the Académie de Danse. I saw him by chance a few weeks later and asked him what he would do? He told me he had no alternative but to join the circus or the army as, without a certificate from the academy, he had no qualifications. I was very sad for him, and I told him that one day I would grow up and be rich and I asked him to wait for me. ‘I will marry you and look after you and you will teach me to fly!’

  He didn’t laugh, instead he touched my cheek lightly with the back of his finger, ‘Keep practising, kid, and one day we will meet on the highwire and then go to the trapeze and we will fly into each other’s arms.’

  On my tenth birthday I was given a party, the same sort of party all little rich girls get when they’re growing up. I only remember two things about it, though there was one more thing I ought to have remembered and did some time later. But at ten, children do not have the same priorities as adults. However, what I did remember was the cake and the wish I made when I blew out the ten candles set into its lovely thick pink icing.

  It was an orange poppyseed cake with layers of cream and green marzipan and the usual fuss was made when it was time to blow out the candles and make a wish. I took a deep breath and to the raucous cheering and clapping of the invited children and assembled adults I blew all the candles out in a single breath.

  ‘Make a wish! Make a wish!’everyone shouted.

  I closed my eyes and suddenly my imagination filled with people, clowns and acrobats, jugglers, dancing ponies, a tiger that snarled and jumped through a flaming hoop, dwarfs, and a magician in a black frock coat and opera hat and cloak just like what my dear papa wore when he went to the theatre. And in my mind I could hear a voice and it was the voice of Eugene Wilenski, my young dancing master, and I looked up and there he stood on a high swaying pole, which almost touched the canvas roof of the circus tent. I saw the highwire strung from the pole to another on the far side of the tent and he was calling for me to join him.

  ‘Come, little Tamara,’ he called in my imagination, ‘I must have you for my partner, you must walk the wire with me and do somersaults in the air!’ He stretched out his arms. ‘Will you fly into my arms? Shall I wait for you?’

  And then there was nothing and I heard myself saying, ‘When I grow up I shall join the circus and become a trapeze artist! That is my dearest wish.’

  All the adults laughed, except my mother, and when all the guests had gone I was sent to my room without any supper, which was no hardship as I couldn’t have eaten another thing anyway. What was not so nice were my mother’s instructions to my nanny, an old babushka with one rheumy eye and five coarse hairs sticking out of her chin, who was so ancient she had once been my mother’s nanny. She mixed a glass of soapy water and made me wash my mouth out, and then made me swallow the last mouthful of soap suds so that I heaved and brought up the orange poppyseed cake, among other things.

  The old hag admonished me. ‘That will teach you to disobey your mother. You will grow up to be a perfect young lady, it is compulsory, then you will marry into the nobility and that is all there is to it!’

  ‘You are not my mother!’I cried.

  ‘I speak for her,’ she spat back. ‘You will do as your mama says! Only peasants are tumblers and clowns!’She rose and took the night lamp with her, knowing that I was terrified of the dark. I cried myself to sleep.

  Children are not given credit for strong emotions and, in my experience, seldom taken seriously. I was in love and I realised that night that while my inexperience had no name for what I felt, I had been in love with Eugene Wilenski, my young dancing instructor, from the age of seven.

  Tamara Polyansky pauses and looks around at the group. ‘You have all led such hard, dangerous lives, you must think that my story is being childish and I was some spoiled little rich girl. And, of course, you would be right. When I was growing up I never had to think about anything of importance. Nothing in my life represented any danger to myself or those around me. Food and clothes and a warm bed, holidays in France and England, always in the winter, so my father could show his furs. All these privileges I enjoyed without thinking them in the least extraordinary.

  ‘I can see from the slightly indulgent looks on your faces that you think my desire to become a circus entertainer, a trapeze artist, was a child’s notion, a little rich girl’s fantasy, and would soon be forgotten. Furthermore, the idea of a ten-year-old girl falling absolutely head over heels in love is not new. Puppy love is common enough, and you will no doubt find mine highly amusing.’

  I immediately seek to reassure her. ‘Tamara, there is no need to be defensive, we are your friends. So far it is a very good story. People like us have never even entered a house like yours!’I think for a moment, ‘Well, perhaps the professor, but certainly not somebody like me.’

  The others nod in agreement, with the exception of the professor. And, of course, Olga Zorbatov, who as a matter of principle would not agree and would naturally want us to think that, because her husband Sergei was a professor of the stars and a confidant of loony members of the aristocracy, she was accustomed to entering such grand palaces.

  Anxious to calm her fears, I continue, ‘Your life as a child is as strange to us, Tamara Polyansky, as Mr Petrov’s childhood in a fishing village on the banks of the Volga would have seemed to you. So far, my dear, we are loving it a lot and also learning new things about you.’ I pause and then add, ‘So, you can speak French and I must say I have always admired your nice manners.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Moses.’ Tamara looks at me gratefully and then gives a nervous little laugh. ‘I too have to say that, tonight, hearing myself talk of those days in the Crimea and contrasting it with what happened to me, it is almost as strange for me to understand as it is for you.’ She sighs. ‘Such a long long time ago, and yet not that long!’

  ‘The only significant measurement of time is experience,’ the professor says suddenly. ‘History does not record routine and only measures birth, disaster and upheaval in the chronology of our lives.’

  For once, I think, I understand this point and what’s more agree with him. Mayb
e I’m getting smart in my old age? Though, more likely, with my luck, the professor is getting stupid. But he is correct, the time span of my own life has always been measured by four disasters. One was the year the crops failed and the government confiscated all the food they could find in the Jewish shtetls to give to those Russians who were not Jews. I remember how all the old people in our village deliberately starved themselves to death so that what food we could find would keep the young ones alive. Then there were three Cossack raids, the last one you know about, and of course it was the worst of all. Only I remained with any time left on the disaster calendar of life.

  Everything I ever think about starts and finishes with these four disasters. Or what the professor calls upheavals. It is the only measurement I have of my existence on earth. And now, I think to myself, we are about to hear Tamara Polyansky’s calendar of upheavals. She who, I beg your pardon, speaks French and has learned English manners so that she should know better than to kiss randy village boys and start maybe a sexual orgy. This is some potential upheaval, disaster, concerning us all which maybe I have personally averted.

  ‘You will recall that I told you of two of my memories of the day of the pink-cake birthday, but there was a third,’ Tamara begins, taking up her story again. ‘The presence of Count Tolstoy at my birthday party.

  ‘Tolstoy was already an old man and in poor health and had come to live in the Crimea. He had just published his great masterpiece, Hadji Murad, and my father, a worshipful and devoted follower, had sent the great Russian genius a sable coat as a gesture of his admiration for the new novel.’

  ‘Hadji Murad is the greatest story in the Russian language, in any language, greater even than King Lear!’ the professor rudely interrupts again.

  ‘I beg to disagree, Professor, Hadji Murad was a tartar, a Muslim, a Chechen from the Caucasian mountains and no friend of the Jews! This much I know of history, also Tolstoy I know, Peter the Great, Catherine, also the Great, but who is this king who wrote a book?’

  ‘No, no, my dear, King Lear is a play by William Shakespeare, it is thought by many people to be the greatest story ever told!’

  Ha! I think, nothing has changed, the professor is just as stupid as before and I am not maybe getting smarter. Hadji Murad was a legendary Chechen general under the imam Shamil of the Caucasian mountains who fought the Russian Empire in a holy war not so very long ago. Every Russian knows this and also they know Tolstoy, who stands only next to God and the Tsar in the big knows. But who is this William Shakespeare? This is someone a person should know?

  But, of course, I say none of this. To think is free, to speak can be costly. I’m sorry now that I asked the question, so all I say is, ‘That’s nice, Professor, maybe some other time this interesting lecture? Tonight, if you would be so kind, we are hearing maybe the greatest story never written by Tamara Polyansky!’ I look over at Miss Showbiz, ‘I apologise for adding to a certain person’s rude interruption, please continue, Tamara.’

  ‘Well, Count Tolstoy must have received my father’s gift of the sable coat and it being a pleasant enough, though very cold, day he had put it on and driven over to our estate in a troika. Why, I can only presume, to receive more admiration and adulation from my father, as it was unthinkable that the great man would actually express his gratitude to a fur merchant, a lower member of a society he considered totally corrupt. Count Tolstoy was grateful to no man and it is doubtful he even felt he owed God the least gesture of thanks for granting him the breath of life.’ Miss Showbiz laughed, ‘Please understand, these are not my own observations but the sentiments I heard expressed about Tolstoy by the writer Maxim Gorky to my father when I was thirteen. After Count Tolstoy’s visit my father thought of himself as a bibliophile and began to collect writers. Those he most admired received a fur coat. Gorky’s was silver mink.’

  Mink, shmink! So much for Mrs Solomon’s good coat! I think to myself. Then I look around at our motley group in their badly worn coats. Olga Zorbatov has a bit of mouldy fox around her collar but there is otherwise no fur to be seen. Mr Mendelsohn’s coat is perhaps the best of a bad lot, not counting my own of course. He is holding the baby to his chest under his coat with its dear little head poking out the top of the lapels and both of them are fast asleep.

  But back to Tamara’s story.

  Anyhow, on this afternoon when Count Tolstoy came over to our estate he totally ignored the usual protocol. Tapping his malacca cane on the marquetry floor as though he was blind, and without removing his coat and top hat, he walked straight past the footman and the protesting butler down through the picture gallery and arrived unannounced in the ballroom where my birthday party was taking place.

  In fact, he arrived at the very moment I blew out the candles and declared my wish to be a circus acrobat.

  ‘That is an excellent wish, my dear!’ Tolstoy declared. ‘If more well-born young ladies became acrobats and more acrobats became aristocrats, the Russian nobility would not be the ridiculous circus it has become, and the Tsar not its chief clown.’

  He chuckled happily at his own remark, then declared, ‘I have thirteen children, all of them born into the nobility, and there is not a decent specimen, not even a good acrobat, amongst them!’

  Tolstoy turned to where my father stood and dis-missively touched the magnificent sable coat he wore with the tips of his fingers, flicking them away from the soft fur. ‘Sir!’ he said, almost imperceptibly nodding his magnificent white beard and, at the same time, completely ignoring the presence of my mother who stood thin-lipped beside my astonished and speechless papa.

  Tolstoy again addressed me. Scowling at me he said, ‘I don’t much like children, but that was a fine wish, young lady. Remember, my dear, faith and love require courage and daring.’

  Then the old man turned and walked slowly out of the ballroom, through the long gallery, out of the house and was helped into his waiting troika by his manservant, who wrapped a well-worn marmoset fur blanket around his master’s knees. He then removed Tolstoy’s top hat and placed a Cossack fur hat upon his bald head and wrapped a woollen scarf about the old man’s face.

  I recall my father still looking completely stunned and running down the steps, his shoes crunching in the snow and shouting, ‘A new fur blanket for the troika, maybe? A little champagne, Master? Some hot beef soup to take on the journey?’

  Count Tolstoy removed the scarf from his face. ‘Good God, man! Is there no end to your impertinence? I am a vegetarian!’ Then he wrapped the scarf back over his face, settled into his cocoon of fur, and was off in a snuffling of horses and jingle of sleigh bells.

  Whereupon my poor papa was so overcome with gratitude at this visit by the great writer that his eyes brimmed with tears and he started to shake all over, and had to be led back indoors and up the grand staircase on my mother’s arm, sniffing and sighing all the way to the bedchamber.

  My mama, though, was less impressed by the intrusion. She had been completely ignored and humiliated by a member of the aristocracy and she was very angry. She returned to the ballroom soon afterwards. ‘You and your little friends will eat a piece of cake and then they must go home! There is a present for each of them,’ she said. Then, calling my old babushka nanny over, she whispered into her ear and then looked in my direction and smiled at me. It was a smile I knew well, cold as ice. It was only then that I realised that she was also angry with me, though I could not imagine what I had done to upset her. As I cried myself to sleep that night I thought her anger couldn’t possibly be simply because I had made a childish and inappropriate wish, but that it must somehow have something to do with the silly old man who had so rudely interrupted my party.

  While Tamara is talking, I look over at the still sleeping Mr Mendelsohn holding Anya’s baby in his arms and the infant is now sucking on the top button of his overcoat. I think to myself, how very nice it would be to be a baby snug against my father’s breast. Or even to be as contentedly asleep as Mr Mendelsohn himself. All we have h
eard so far is of pink poppyseed cakes, candles, wishing, circus acrobats, weeping fur merchants and Tolstoy, who everyone knows was a misogynist. Maybe a babushka nanny knows something? A little soap in the mouth was not such a bad thing after all. If you don’t mind my saying so, from adventure, so far this story goes nowhere not very quickly.

  But naturally, all this I say on the inside and on the outside I struggle not to fall asleep! But then, suddenly the story brightens up a bit.

  My love for Eugene Wilenski never wavered and nor did my desire to become a trapeze artist and acrobat. Yet I kept my determination to myself so that when I ran away from home at the age of thirteen to join a circus, the wish I had made on my tenth birthday had long since been forgotten by my family.

  By this time the Tolstoy visit had been blown up out of all proportion. The collective family memory had become somewhat smudged and the incident was now retold as a visit to my father on his birthday (conveniently three days earlier) by the great writer to express his sincere thanks for the sable coat. To hear him speak of it was to presume that my papa and Count Tolstoy were thick as thieves and the occasion a grand banquet, not merely a ten-year-old’s silly birthday party.

  We were on a business trip to Siberia, where we had travelled part of the way on the Trans-Siberian Railway which was not yet completed, and thereafter by river steamer up the Irtysh River to Omsk where my father had come to bid at a fur auction. By this time Papa was also heavily involved in the wool trade and he had secured a contract to supply overcoats to the Tsar’s navy.

  Siberia is not a good place to start if you should decide to run away from home. It is filled with vast spaces with not very much in them and a runaway thirteen-year-old girl with a fancy accent and good clothes would soon be noticed. But there was a circus playing in Omsk to which I had been taken. In it was a team of acrobats and trapeze artists who were simply splendid and I made my mind up there and then to become one of them. I had no choice. It was either my father or Eugene Wilenski and I decided I would never fly into my father’s arms nor could he walk the highwire with me where heaven begins. At thirteen I was getting almost too old to train as an acrobat. I knew I couldn’t leave it a moment longer.