We have persuaded the authorities to return his body to you, though it is sealed in lead and may not be opened for fear that the typhoid may spread. You must honour your husband by complying strictly with this request. Besides, he would wish you to remember him as he was when he left his beloved family.
My own sentence has five years yet to run and I do not suppose I shall leave this place alive. May God bless you and your children. It remains only for me to say that my life has been made richer by the gifts of your husband whom I counted as my friend. Cleopatra’s Cat is now returned to you and I hope will survive a difficult journey accompanying the body of Sir Uri Shebaldin, Surgeon to the Queen of Egypt.
My salutations to your two lovely daughters. I remain, madam, your faithful admirer,
Alexander Proknikoff, Medical Doctor.
What a feast was prepared, and Cleopatra’s Cat was the centre of attention as students and teachers from the Academy of Medicine and all our friends celebrated his death in true Russian style. Uri’s notes were welcomed at the academy and he was hailed as a true hero of Mother Russia. A year later the Tsar presented me with the Medal of Honour, Second Class, and a military band played at the ceremony in the great square outside the Winter Palace. At the presentation the principal of the academy spoke of Uri as a remarkable surgeon and announced that a new and modern operating theatre would be built in his honour and named after him.
Sophia Shebaldin gives a brief smile. ‘My beloved husband had been completely exonerated as well as vindicated and now Mother Russia clasped our little family to her fond bosom. The so-called Bolshevik surgeon was the hero of the hour and those who had maliciously brought about his downfall and his death now hurried to kiss my hand.’
Sophia Shebaldin shrugs. ‘I thank you for your patience and for taking me into your small group. I feel humble that you would welcome me.’ She pauses and smiles, looking at each of us. ‘And that, my dear friends, is the end of my little story.’
We all clap furiously, it is a wonderful tale and, despite the interruptions, very well told. Of course, the one question on all of our minds is how, with all the honours and posthumous fame bestowed on Uri Shebaldin, Sophia Shebaldin should come to be in our little group, which is definitely no place for the rich or famous. But I am glad to say that we hold our tongues. Even Olga Zorbatov manages to remain stumm.
That night we eat with relish. After all, it is not every night we are privileged to hear a good story and, at the same time, enjoy a truly delicious horse-meat stew to match it. When we finish eating, to our surprise and, I must say, delight, Sophia Shebaldin offers to tell us the remainder of her remarkable adventure.
‘I wanted that you should eat in a happy frame of mind,’ she explains. ‘It was a lovely dinner tonight, Mrs Moses, and I didn’t want to spoil it with talk of sorrow.’ She pauses. ‘I thank you for your good manners, for not demanding to know how I have come to be with all of you on the road to freedom.’
We all grin rather sheepishly, she had guessed at our curiosity and disappointment and now she was rewarding us.
‘The great flu epidemic of 1907 took Tanya and little Anna,’ Sophia Shebaldin says quietly and then she begins to weep softly. I put my arm around her, but she gently shakes me away. ‘I am such a coward,’ she sobs, ‘but I can bear it no longer. Mother Russia has destroyed us completely, there is no more happiness for me in this old, cruel land.’
She sniffs and wipes her tears on the sleeve of her dress, then sniffs again and lifts her chin defiantly. ‘I shall go to London where I will search for a ginger cat. Then, together, we will take the boat to Egypt where I will sit on the edge of the desert and dream and my English cat will nap in the sun.’ Sophia Shebaldin seems to be thinking for a moment, then adds, ‘I shall put up a sign outside my little home which reads “Foot Doctor”. There will always be people passing by who suffer from sore and weary feet. I shall restore them and send them on their way.’ She smiles brightly, ‘So, you see, we will always have sufficient to eat.’ She then adds, as though it is necessary to justify this notion of going to Egypt, ‘An old woman and a ginger cat, whom I shall name Sir Frederick Treves, do not require much to stay alive.’ She looks up and although the night is warm she appears to shiver. ‘My bones are so very cold, I go to warm them in the desert sunlight and to rest at night under an Arabian sky pricked by a million stars.’
There is silence and then, to my surprise, Mr Petrov speaks. ‘And what happened to Cleopatra’s Cat, Madam Shebaldin?’
Sophia Shebaldin laughs, a genuine laugh that comes from her stomach, one we have never heard before. It is pretty and light-hearted and makes us all feel good. Then she spreads her arms wide with her palms open and upwards. ‘You know cats, Mr Petrov. They don’t like to be moved. Cleopatra’s Cat was last seen catching the train back to Siberia. If you ask me, another cat-astrophe in the making!’
TO THE FOUR WINDS
Here I take up the author’s voice again, for although Mrs Moses told me most of what happened to the characters in her sojourn, some details concerning the whereabouts of people was gathered from letters to her which she left in my care. Still other information came to me through my own research efforts.
Mrs Moses’s group eventually crossed into Poland where the Polish authorities, sick and tired of people fleeing from Russia, put them into a cattle truck and moved them to the German border.
Mrs Moses and her little group were most grateful for the lift across Poland, a country they collectively regarded as being very little improvement on Russia. In Germany they noticed that a lot of marching was going on and that there seemed to be soldiers everywhere. Mrs Moses had had enough of soldiers, whom she saw as the same old hunters, whatever their uniform.
She appealed to a Jewish refugee agency, which provided them with train tickets and food to get them to Paris. It was only when they arrived in Paris that they finally broke up and went their separate ways…
THE TWELVE LOST TRIBES OF CALIFORNIA
Firstly there were the children in the group, all of them orphans except for little Tanya, Anya’s child, who had survived the Cossack attack in the arms of Mrs Moses. Belonging to no one, the children had simply joined the journey along the way, they couldn’t recall ever having belonged to a family other than perhaps a ragamuffin gang living on the streets of some faraway town or city. Left alone, most of them would almost certainly have come to a sad ending, preyed upon by the evil elements in every society, to become thieves, drunkards and prostitutes.
The great trek out of the Russian wilderness under the leadership and love of Mrs Moses was the first time they had experienced affection of any kind. Although Olga Zorbatov was a real pain in the toukis (the bum) to all the adults, the kids loved her even more than they loved Anya, which is saying a whole heap.
With twelve children to feed, Olga Zorbatov eventually got to California and then to the city of Los Angeles. Her husband Sergei was still sending her nightly messages from the stars, and she set up as a psychic.
Her timing was perfect. Nestled among the orange orchards in the tiny hamlet of Hollywood, the fledgling Californian movie industry was just beginning to stir. The silent movies needed kids and Olga Zorbatov had twelve hungry mouths to feed. Her dozen little ragamuffins, who worked as a perfect team, were a movie director’s dream. They could and would do anything for a laugh and seemed to have no fear. Maybe you’ve seen some of those very old silent movies on TV? For instance, the kids in Max Sennett’s first Hollywood movies were mostly Mrs Z’s orphans or what she referred to as ‘One each of the Lost Tribes of Israel plus One.’
Mrs Z had given the children all the same surname, though not her own. When she had landed at Ellis Island in New York the clerk had asked her for her name. ‘These are your children, Mrs Zorbatov?’ the official asked, then, ‘Give me their names please.’
‘Moses, all are Moses!’ Mrs Z declared.
The immigration officer was accustomed to confusion and he sighed, it was going
to be a long day. ‘All are called Moses Zorbatov?’
Olga Zorbatov was losing patience with the stupid man. ‘No, me I am Zorbatov, they Moses,’ she grabbed a small girl, ‘Tanya Moses!’ Then she pointed to a boy, ‘Ivan Moses!’
The official nodded his head. ‘And where is Mrs Moses?’ he asked.
‘She go to Australia,’ Olga declared.
‘Well, with twelve children I can’t say I blame her?’ the weary immigration officer answered, then began the task of writing down the names of the children and appending Moses to each of them.
Olga Zorbatov had named all the children in honour of Mrs Moses who she said had led them all out of the wilderness. Because there were twelve children, she likened it to Moses leading the tribes of Israel out of bondage. She was not a Jew herself, nor, for that matter, did she suppose any of the children were, that is but for one small boy named Moshe who was circumcised and so became her Plus One. She told them that each of them came from one of the eleven lost tribes of Israel, while Moshe with the missing foreskin was kosher, that is to say, he came from the Hebrew tribe, the one that didn’t manage to get itself lost.
With her fortune-telling and her children playing crowd scenes and bit parts and running messages on the film lots she managed to survive, and she boasted that her lost tribes had never gone without a meal in America.
Then, one day, she hit upon her one really big idea. She decided to open the first casting agency in Hollywood.
Actually, it wasn’t her idea, and in truth, she never claimed it was, giving all the credit instead to her husband from whom she still took her instructions as he schlepped across the midnight sky, riding on the tail of this or that sign of the zodiac. She named her casting agency ‘Casting to the Stars’, not because the word ‘Star’ had any meaning in the movie industry at that time, but because her beloved husband, that is Sergei Zorbatov, Grand Chef and Professor of Astrological Science and Zodiac Law, instructed that she should name it after the star-studded firmament. He had always claimed that heaven was the great kitchen of human possibilities. Mrs Z maintained that it was Sergei’s naming of her agency that was the major element in its success.
So successful was Mrs Z at picking acting talent that the very word ‘Star’ as a description for actors who made the big time is derived from the name of Olga Zorbatov’s casting agency. It survives to this day, though under a different name. Apparently she had neglected to register the name and so the term ‘Casting to the Stars’ was pinched by the proliferation of casting consultancies that emerged over the years, so that as a term it has become almost a cliché. When this happened Mrs Z changed the name of her agency to Central Casting of Hollywood.
As for what happened to each of the eleven Lost Tribes of Israel Plus One, that is another story and another book. But then a great many books have been written about the great American dream and the world doesn’t need another one.
Olga Zorbatov never married (‘Sergei would kill me!’) and she eventually died at the comparatively young age of sixty. Her funeral was attended by ten of her lost tribes, including her Plus One, Moshe, together with thirty-nine of her grandchildren and one hundred and three great-grandchildren.
In her last will and testament Olga Zorbatov didn’t bequeath a cent to any of them, instead leaving nearly eight million dollars to establish a Chair of Astrological Science at the University of California. It is no coincidence that California has been producing highly intelligent nutcases and weirdos ever since.
THE CHICKENS WHO LOVED TCHAIKOVSKY
Of Anya and Mr Mendelsohn a quieter story. They too went to America, straight to Boston where Mr Mendelsohn was disappointed to find that the famous symphony orchestra was not for sale, not even for all the pearls in the South Sea.
However, he did eventually become its First Violin. He married Anya in the Russian Orthodox Church in Boston, which was what she wanted. In return she gave him two more sons and made him chicken and mushroom soup every night of his life.
Alas, the soup was not as good as her Russian concoctions, which concerned her greatly, and she often lamented that she was unable to find the various types of mushrooms she required. She also complained about the chickens. ‘American chickens eat the wrong kind of worms,’ she’d say. ‘Maybe making a living for worms is too easy in America and they don’t work hard enough to give the chicken meat the best flavour. Also, there is no blue corn to feed them.’
Later in her life, when battery hens came into vogue, she got really angry and cashed in the last of the mermaid’s pearls and started her own chicken farm.
When Mr Mendelsohn eventually retired from the Boston Symphony Orchestra he would play to the chickens morning and night. ‘It’s not maybe so glamorous as mermaids,’ he would say, ‘but, believe me, a chicken has better taste in music.’ In fact, Anya’s chickens loved his whole repertoire and in particular Tchaikovsky. This especially endeared them to him and they returned the compliment by laying the best eggs in America.
Anya imported worms and mushroom spawn from Russia and a sack of best blue corn which she sowed by hand in the traditional peasant manner. The worms thrived in her compost heap, the mushrooms flourished in a disused horse stable and the corn took to the more democratic American climate which resulted in one bumper crop after another. Soon Mr Mendelsohn was enjoying chicken soup second to none, the best in the world, whatever country you care to name in chicken-soup competition, including Israel.
Their three children grew to adulthood, the daughter born with Mrs Moses on the road in Russia and the two sons in America, and together they opened a restaurant called Mr Mendelsohn’s Chicken Spit, which sold barbecue chicken and chicken and mushroom soup (six varieties of mushroom skilfully blended). Later, as they began to expand, they adapted the name of their several restaurants to Mr Chicken Spit, a chain which boasted that it used only free-range chickens and White Russian field mushrooms (the Cold War was still on). Today it is called The Chicken Spit and is a franchise operation which has eight hundred outlets in America and another six hundred throughout the world. Next year the first Chicken Spit opens in Red Square in Moscow directly opposite Lenin’s tomb. Anya’s grandchild, Michael Mendelsohn, who graduated summa cum laude at MIT with a Master of Science in Food Technology, is now chief executive of CSI Inc. (Chicken Spit International) and will be there with the Foreign Secretary, who will officially open the first Russian franchise.
It’s a great pity that Anya and Mr Mendelsohn never lived to see this triumphant return to Mother Russia, though, admittedly, he would have been one hundred and eleven years old and she one hundred and sixteen.
Mr Mendelsohn died of a heart attack in 1961 while listening to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 on the radio and when Anya found him in his old leather armchair he still had a smile on his face.
That night Anya made chicken and mushroom soup as usual and then sat quietly beside Mr Mendelsohn, whom she had bathed and dressed in his best silk pyjamas and put into the bed they had shared for nearly fifty years. She sat beside him with the steaming bowl on a tray on her lap. ‘I loved you, Mr Mermaid Man,’ she said quietly, ‘every day of our wonderful life.’ The next morning she was found dead, still seated beside her beloved violinist, his beautiful hands with the long, elegant fingers clasped in her lap.
At the autopsy, traces of Entoloma sinuatum were discovered in Anya’s stomach. It is also known as the Poison Chalice and is another of the clever little mushrooms a peasant girl from a Russian village makes it her business to know all about in case someday it comes in useful.
A HERO OF LENINGRAD
And now news of Tamara Polyansky, who also went to America where she joined the great Barnum & Bailey Circus as one of its leading attractions.
But not all migrant stories turn out happily ever after, and while she enjoyed great notoriety and top billing in the famous circus, Tamara was never really happy in America. She found it difficult to understand the American people who, on the surface, acted so friendly
and after five minutes of acquaintance invited you into their homes, but seemed reluctant to enter into any deep or meaningful relationship. ‘America,’ she would say, ‘is a mile wide and an inch deep, Russia is an inch wide and a mile deep. That is why we can never understand each other.’
On the surface she seemed to have everything, fame and fortune as well as beauty. But what Tamara Polyansky craved more than anything was love, to find another Eugene Wilenski, to fly with him through the air high above the gasping crowd and then later to hold him in her adoring arms while they made wonderful love.
What is perhaps the strangest thing of all is that she longed for Siberia where she had spent the first years of her circus life. Circus life is frantic and often quarrelsome, full of petty jealousy and back-stabbing, where each performer competes with the others for a higher billing position on the circus posters or a bigger name in lights outside the big top. Moreover, circuses in America were often attached to country fairs, rodeos, Fourth of July parades and all the razzamatazz of an immature people, and Tamara, increasingly, longed for the quiet of the endless tundra and the deep respect Russians hold for a great artist.
Tamara Polyansky’s desire for solitude was probably some sort of romantic notion brought about by too much suffering and tragedy in her life.
The Russian personality is very big on suffering and the American not at all keen on it, so Tamara may have come to believe that what she now craved was the solitude of Siberia, having entirely forgotten how awful it had been in the first place.
Tamara tried to leave the circus when she met and married a dashing young American flyer, five years younger than herself. Not a trapeze flyer, but a young airman who flew a Sopwith Camel in the United States Air Corps. But again her timing was lousy and tragedy struck once more when her young husband was shot down and killed over France in 1917 on the first day the Americans saw combat in the air during the Great War.
The Family Frying Pan Page 17