‘You are crying for the appendicectomy?’ the professor says, clearly confused.
Sophia Shebaldin wipes the tears from her eyes.
‘The first appendicectomy operation to be performed in Russia, it was the cause of my tragedy, our eventual downfall,’ she sniffs again.
She is not the crying type nor even the sort of person you would know how to properly comfort in a weeping situation. Sophia Shebaldin is a thin woman who seems to be composed of sharp edges and hard flat places. Narrow-chested, high-shouldered, legs like knotted twigs on tiny feet, skin stretched taut over her face, a reserved person who seems not to encourage familiarity, though I should add, her expression is never foreboding or unwelcoming. There is simply no fuss to her. Even her grey hair is smoothed and pulled so tightly back into a bun that it gives less the impression of hair than of helmet fashioned in steel. And her hands are long and thin, not beautiful like Mr Mendelsohn’s. It is as though her fingers and palms contained no flesh, only a layer of skin to hide the bones beneath.
Only when she massages your tired feet, or works on a painful corn or drains a blister or gently rubs a sprained ankle do you know immediately that these are special hands, the hands of a true healer. She lays them on a painful place and those long, bony fingers seem to pluck the pain from the muscle or the bruise, as though indignant that it should be there. In an hour or two you are ready for the road again.
Of all the people in our little group we can least afford to lose, that is to say, after Mr Petrov of course, it is surely the quiet and unassuming Mrs Shebaldin. But when you thank her for what she does with those remarkable hands she appears embarrassed, ‘Tch! It is nothing, only a little massage, any person with a bit of commonsense could do it.’
Because she so easily dismisses our praise, we have, perhaps mistakenly, never seen her as the emotional type, not the sort of person to have a lively imagination. Now we wait for her to explain the tragedy of the appendicectomy.
She looks up at the professor as she speaks. ‘You will perhaps recall that the English king, Edward the Seventh, who is cousin to Tsar Nicholas, received the first operation on the human appendix the very day before his coronation was to take place. It was a desperate measure by the royal surgeon Sir Frederick Treves and it saved the king’s life.’
The professor nods, though I am not sure that, like the rest of us, this is not news to him as well. Russia and England are not friends at that moment and not much is heard about the English people that is complimentary. For my part I am not even sure what is this appendix that nearly killed the English king.
‘Not so fast if you please, Sophia,’ I say. ‘What is this appendicectomy?’ The others nod agreement, I was right to ask.
Mrs Shebaldin goes to answer when Professor Smarty-Pants says, ‘A blind tube projecting from the rounded end of the large intestine.’
How does he know this stuff? This professor of bird calls and numbers?
‘So?’ I say again, spreading my hands, ‘Tell me, please, what does this tube that can’t see actually do?’ This is the first time I have heard that there are tubes in my body that have eyes.
‘Blind means it goes nowhere, does nothing useful, the appendix is a vestigial organ with no function in humans.’
‘Ha!’ says Olga Zorbatov, ‘So Mrs Shebaldin’s husband is correct, it is a human part that is no use at all!’ She looks pleased that the professor has been caught out.
Mrs Shebaldin on the other hand does not change her expression, she is not interested in playing tricks with the professor or in being proved to be right in the first place.
‘Just a little wormlike thing located on the lower right of the stomach,’ she says, touching a spot on her lower abdomen and at the same time showing us she knows just as much as the professor without having to gloat like Olga Zorbatov who knows nothing about appendix, worms and tubes, blind or otherwise.
‘A little worm that’s blind and does nothing, so what’s the problem please?’I can see that again I am not the only one who thinks this is a good question.
The professor goes to answer, his mouth is half open, but I hold up my hand. ‘I think we are forgetting who is telling this interesting story already, Professor.’
I nod to Sophia Shebaldin. It is a good night, we have a little horse meat and fresh vegetables and potatoes, everything is cooking along nicely and the smells coming from the frying pan are making our stomachs growl. If Sophia Shebaldin’s story can get under way maybe we can eat soon.
‘It, this little worm, can become infected and cause inflammation and terrible pain and even burst, and a person with appendicitis may die,’ Sophia says. ‘They were trying to drain the infection from the English king but the pain and the cramps grew more severe and on the night before his coronation, fever, vomiting and diarrhoea threatened to kill him. Sir Frederick Treves, the royal surgeon, decided to operate, to open him up and drain the infection on the spot and so history was made. Maybe it was not the first appendix operation, who can say for sure, but it was the first on a king and so naturally everyone says it is the first on anybody. And the news spread around the world, even to Russia who was not speaking to England.’
‘Schish! What an expert!’ is all I can say about Sophia Shebaldin. An expert who knows about a king’s personal operations. I can see that even the professor is impressed.
‘So?’I say, ‘Tell us more if you please.’
Well, my husband Uri and all the other surgeons at the academy hear soon enough about this kingly operation and suddenly it is appendix this and appendicectomy that and appendicitis something else. Every peasant who comes along with a stomach ache they want to open up and cut out his little worm. And then one night, very late, long after we have gone to bed, comes a knock at the door of our house. It is a footman from the palace of Prince Felix Youssopov and he has a note from a physician who is well known among the nobility. The note asks for Uri to come to the prince’s palace at Dvortsovaya Ploshchad at once, and to bring his surgical instruments with him.
It is nearly two o’clock in the morning when Uri arrives and he is taken immediately to a bedchamber where a small girl is lying. She is maybe eight years old and he is informed that she is the prince’s favourite niece and also related to the Tsar and must be saved.
Uri goes into consultation with the physician, who is convinced that the child has appendicitis. She has a high fever, cramps in the area around the right hip bone and navel, frequent nausea and vomiting, and she is in great pain. The child has been sick for several days and in the last two hours has become unconscious. The fear is that she is dying and it is clear that she cannot be moved. The physician wants Uri to conduct an emergency operation right there in the palace. Everything has been made ready in the kitchen, surfaces have been scrubbed and disinfected, water is boiling and extra lamps have been brought in to aid the operation.
Uri is reluctant, he belongs to the new school of hygiene and the palace kitchen is not suitable for complete sterilisation and, besides, he has not personally conducted an appendicectomy before. The little princess has a pulse rate which is dangerously low and he is reluctant to give her chloroform, which in these conditions could quite easily have stopped her heart.
‘You must operate!’ the famous physician insists. ‘This is no different to the English king. The prince will not forgive you if she dies!’ He pauses and rubs his beard. ‘The Youssopov family has eighty grand estates all over Russia and is second in power only to the Tsar himself.’ He fixes Uri with his monocle. ‘What kind of career do you imagine you will have at the Academy of Medicine?’ He nods his head towards the unconscious child. ‘That is to say if the little princess should die without an attempt to save her?’ He seems to squint even harder through the glass eyepiece, ‘On the other hand, if the child should live, a professor of surgery is not out of the question.’
Uri performed the operation but they had called him in too late, and as the infection had spread to the abdominal cavity the princes
s died two days later of peritonitis. The first appendix operation performed on a royal personage in Russia had failed.
The news of the little princess’s death was carried by the newspapers and the comparison was naturally made with the English surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves. He had managed to save a king. A great scandal was in the making and the court gossips eagerly pointed out that whereas an English king had been saved, a Russian surgeon couldn’t even manage to save a small princess who belonged to relatively minor royalty. The papers lamented that Russia, the Tsar and the powerful Youssopov family had been disgraced and humiliated. A scapegoat was needed and Uri was arrested as a clandestine Bolshevik seeking to destroy the throne and sentenced to five years in the salt mines in Siberia.
Being a man of otherwise good character the judge allowed Uri to return home for the banquet of farewell. Or, as it is known by the lower orders and country people, the Feast of the Dead. For this, an open coffin is brought by pallbearers into the prisoner’s house and, at one stage during the festivities, he is made to lie in his own death box. The village priest says the prayers for the dearly departed over his live body, whereupon the guests drink a toast of vodka to his future memory. The banquet of farewell held for Uri was a less bizarre affair, but nevertheless his colleagues from the Academy of Medicine, those who were not too frightened to attend, and our friends and relations scarcely harboured any more hope for his safe return than a peasant family might a convicted son or father. Siberia was a one-way ticket, the cattle trucks were known to always return empty.
Finally the time came for Uri to bid our little family, myself and our two little girls, goodbye. It was a terrible moment for we were very much in love and he doted on Tanya and little Anna. The death of the princess had caused him a great deal of personal distress. The little girl had been the same age as Tanya our eldest. The thought that it could have been Tanya or her younger sister who had died had caused my husband to accept with equanimity his bitter sentence. Somehow, he felt himself to blame, even though both professors of surgery at the academy, called in at the autopsy, had testified to the judge that all the evidence indicated that the surgeon’s knife had come too late to save the child, and that peritonitis was well advanced before incision was made and had been the certain cause of her death.
But then the sentence never was about right or wrong, neglect or otherwise. It was about Russia being made to seem inferior to the hated English, that the ‘so-called’ brilliant young surgeon Uri Shebaldin, unlike the British Sir Frederick Treves, was not up to scratch, or a Bolshevik, or both. It is from such childish notions that the diplomacy of nations is constructed and national pride is gained or lost.
I confess that at our final parting I shed bitter tears and did not behave in the least well. Little Anna, not yet six years old, seeing my distress, crawled onto her father’s knee. ‘Why are you leaving us, Papa?’ she asked. ‘Why is Mama crying so?’
Uri, barely able to contain his own grief, kissed the top of her head and then also drew Tanya to his side and held her against him. ‘I am going to visit the Queen of Egypt,’ he said. ‘She has a beautiful daughter just like you and Tanya, only your hair is fair and your eyes are blue. Her little girl has hair black as midnight and eyes the colour of jade.’
‘What’s her name?’ Anna asked.
‘Who? The Queen of Egypt or her daughter?’
‘The queen’s name is Cleopatra, silly!’ Tanya said to her younger sister. ‘Everyone knows that!’
Anna, not to be outdone, shot back, ‘I know that too, I do, I do! What’s the name of her daughter, Papa?’
Uri thought for a moment, the children’s curiosity had somehow saved us all from breaking down. ‘Princess Nefertiti,’ he smiled.
‘How long will you go away, Papa?’ Tanya asked.
‘Five years, my darling. You will be thirteen and Anna will be eleven, practically grown up, when I return.’
‘Can’t you stay with us? What will become of our mother?’ Anna cried.
There were tears in Uri’s eyes as he held his two little daughters even closer and I could see he was close to breaking down again. ‘Mother Russia must come first, my darlings. She has decided I must go away.’ Two tears rolled slowly down Uri’s cheeks.
‘Is she more important than our mother?’ Tanya asked incredulously.
‘She is the mother of everyone in Russia and cannot be denied,’ I said, saving Uri from a reply which might upset his children. I felt that my heart should break and my lips trembled as I fought to hold back my tears.
Little Anna climbed from her father’s knee and skipped from the room, apparently satisfied with the answer and not understanding the implications of Uri’s departure. She returned a few minutes later with a small ginger kitten in her arms which she held up to her father. ‘You must give it to Queen Cleopatra, Papa. It is a gift from all of us.’
Uri took the kitten, which practically disappeared in his big surgeon’s hands. He was too overcome to protest or to disappoint his youngest daughter and so he put the kitten into the pocket of his great coat. ‘Thank you, darling.’ He kissed Anna and then Tanya. ‘I shall ask Cleopatra’s cat to let you know how things go for us in Egypt.’
‘Cats can’t write letters!’ Anna exclaimed.
Uri patted the pocket of his overcoat. ‘I will teach this one to write, just you see.’
At that moment the captain in charge of the escorting militia entered the room. ‘It is time to go, Surgeon Shebaldin,’ he said.
When, perhaps two days later, I had stopped weeping continuously for my husband, I sat quietly thinking what might become of us. Uri had always been a loving and considerate husband and a wonderful father and the emotional burden of bringing up the two girls on my own seemed overwhelming. I tried to capture every moment of his last few hours with us, his strength and the reassurance that he would return, that five years was not so long. That we would leave Russia with the girls and go elsewhere and make a fresh start. It was then that I thought briefly of the kitten taken by Anna from a litter in the stables. I confess, I gave it scarcely a moment’s thought, it was no more than a small detail in the tragedy of losing my husband forever. I simply assumed Uri would have given the kitten to someone as he was much too kind a man to simply leave it to die. Then, some weeks later, Anna came into breakfast one morning and asked why we hadn’t yet received a letter from Cleopatra’s cat?
‘It has been five weeks. Is Egypt so far away that Papa hasn’t arrived yet? Or do you think I gave him a stupid cat, Mama?’
Tanya sighed heavily. ‘Egypt is a long way away, so they haven’t even arrived yet,’ she said firmly. ‘Besides, you can’t teach a cat to write in five weeks, silly!’
I thought for a moment that I should enlighten them, tell them the truth about their papa. But then I changed my mind, they were simply too young to face the prospect of never seeing their father again. There are, after all, many ways to handle one’s personal grief and the notion of my beloved Uri arriving at the court of the Queen of Egypt on a diplomatic posting from the Tsar seemed no less improbable than the reason he was being sent to Siberia. So I confess I allowed myself to indulge a little in the children’s fantasy.
‘If anyone can teach a cat to write, it is your papa,’ I said. ‘I feel sure that we will soon have news from Cleopatra’s cat, who will tell us how your darling papa is getting on.’
Anna was a persistent child and two months later she asked again why we hadn’t heard from Cleopatra’s cat. The cat was no longer a possessive noun in Anna’s mind, she pronounced it as though the name of the cat was simply ‘Cleopatra’s Cat’.
I wrote every week to Uri, sending my letter to an address he had given me, a hospital in a town in south-western Siberia nearest to where the salt mines are located. Russia, he argued, has few enough doctors and even fewer surgeons. Uri was confident that once he had arrived at his destination, the authorities would not throw away the services of a perfectly good surgeon, but would put him to
work in the prison hospital. Or, if no such institution existed, then in the hospital of the town nearest to the prison camp.
However, it was a logical assumption in a country where logic and commonsense play a very minor part in the behaviour of the bureaucracy. It had been four and a half months since I had first written to him, and I had received no replies to my letters. My beloved Uri had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
I was in a terrible dilemma about whether or not I should tell my children that their father had gone away and would never return. The notion that the cat would write had gathered momentum, and they had become obsessed with the need to hear from it.
Perhaps I, too, needed the comfort of knowing my husband was still alive. Hope, after all, is said to spring eternal, and I confess that my grief had left me in a state where I was incapable of making decisions which required strength of will. My two precious little daughters were all I had left in life and to cause them to share my misery, though it may in the long run have proved to be a wiser thing to do, was quite beyond me.
So I decided to write them letters from Cleopatra’s Cat. I soon convinced myself that this was not as silly as it seemed. I would continue to write to Uri, but now the letters could be channelled through Cleopatra’s Cat. I could reply to letters which it would seem we had received and the girls would then retain some sense of their beloved father, and he would remain a significant and loving influence in their young lives.
I will give you a small and, perhaps trite, example:
Tell Papa that we know he is too busy to write and on a secret mission for Mother Russia but that we love him and miss him. With all our love to him come lots of strokes for you,
Love Tanya, Anna and Sophia.
Tell him never a day passes when he isn’t in our thoughts.
P.S. Your brothers and sisters in the stables are practically grown up and are almost capable of earning their living at catching mice of which there are a great many after the warmer winter. What are the Egyptian mice like, do they also have fleas? Anna wants to know. S, T & Little A.
The Family Frying Pan Page 15