The Family Frying Pan

by Bryce Courtenay

  He was shot down by an Australian infantry soldier who, not recognising the insignia painted on the wings of the biplane, thought it must belong to the enemy. By some incredible fluke he hit Tamara’s airman between the eyes with a single bullet from his Lee Enfield rifle. He got reprimanded and Tamara got the usual ‘Killed in Action’ telegram from Washington.

  ‘Must all the men in my life be shot down!’ was all she said when she got the telegram. Then, dry-eyed, she packed her bags.

  With the death of her American airman and with the advent of the Russian Revolution that year, Tamara remembered the parting words of Count Tolstoy as he lay dying in the little railway station shed. Child, leave Russia and return only when the Tsar and those like him have been overthrown. Miss Showbiz decided to take the advice of the world’s greatest writer and she returned to Moscow.

  For many years after her return she and Mrs Moses exchanged letters and it seemed that Tamara was happy enough. The communists, anxious to stamp their mark on the proletariat, made her a professor at the Academy of Circus and Ballet in Moscow, where she taught acrobatics, the highwire and trapeze and so became a founding member of the now world-famous Moscow Circus. For her brilliant work she was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and, surprisingly, just before the Second World War she was also made a colonel in the Soviet military forces and posted to a circus-training school in Leningrad to help train an entertainment battalion for the Red Army.

  The last letter Mrs Moses received from Tamara Polyansky was in April 1941, and two months later the Germans invaded the USSR. It took Hitler only two and a half months to reach the outskirts of Leningrad, which, as the birthplace of Bolshevism, he swore to wipe from the face of the earth.

  German troops commenced the siege of Leningrad on the 8th of September 1941 and continued until the 27th of January 1944. In Russian history, this great siege where ordinary people resisted the might of the greatest invasion in Russian history is simply called Nine Hundred Days.

  By the time the Germans withdrew from Leningrad, utterly defeated and demoralised, a million ordinary Russian people and soldiers had perished defending the city. Many died from the ceaseless shelling but as many or more dropped dead of hunger and cold in the streets. And when no dogs, cats or rats were left to eat they ate the glue off the back of wallpaper. Mrs Moses prayed to God for every one of those nine hundred days and asked that He should spare her beloved Miss Showbiz.

  In 1950 Mrs Moses received a letter and a small package from the Russian Department of War Veterans to say that Colonel Tamara Polyansky had died in the Siege of Leningrad defending her country. They had found her last will and testament which had been lodged before her posting to Leningrad, as was required with the Department of the Soviet Army in Moscow. She had left all her worldly possessions to Mrs Moses, 107 Campbell Parade, Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. The letter went on to say that her body had never been found and that there were no worldly possessions to inherit, but that to honour Colonel Polyansky’s name the USSR enclosed for Mrs Moses the Medal of Hero of the Soviet Union, an inheritance more valuable to a Russian than life itself.

  Poor Miss Showbiz. I hope she had some happy years jammed in somewhere between all the tragedy in her life. When Mrs Moses died she was buried with the medal awarded to Colonel Tamara Polyansky pinned to her chest. She said she would personally return it to its rightful owner when she got to heaven.

  THE PROFESSOR AND WHACKER’S SULPHUR-CRESTED COCKATOO

  The professor’s story is somewhat different from the rest of Mrs Moses’s little flock. He elected to go to England and when he was asked why he would choose it over America or one of the newer countries like Australia or New Zealand or even South Africa he shrugged. ‘We have Shakespeare in common with the English, that is not a bad start.’

  ‘Shakespeare? What has Russia got to do with Shakespeare? Tolstoy, who is practically still living, yes, but the Englishman is long dead and probably he never even came to Russia,’ Mrs Moses said.

  ‘Russian is the only language in which the works of Shakespeare translate perfectly,’ the professor said. ‘That is enough for me, our hearts and our minds beat to the same rhythm, our tongues to the same cadence, I shall go to England, the English are the only civilised Russians!’

  And that was that. Sometimes after hearing the professor carrying on, Mrs Moses took the trouble to thank the Lord that she wasn’t clever.

  However, it seems the professor must have known something because before you could say ‘Stratford on Avon’, he had been accepted at Oxford University as a don and lecturer in the Department of Russian Literature. And, it seems, he soon became famous, not so much for his lectures on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pushkin but for his bird-watching.

  The English are notorious bird-watchers, or ‘twitchers’ as they are commonly called, and it seems that English academics and intellectuals are particularly keen on putting on their wellies and wading into marshes, getting cold, wet, hungry and devoured by insects or climbing into trees or hides until their bones ache with fatigue, simply to see the first robin in spring or the last swallow in autumn. The professor was soon upgraded to professorial status again, not because his insights into the works of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin or Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky were all that remarkable, but because he seemed to know more about birds than anyone else at the world-famous university. Knowledge of such high order could not be invested in a lowly don and so he was immediately elevated to the rank of Professor.

  Under the patronage of the collective twitchers of England who bought his books on exotic species of birds by the tens of thousands and attended his lectures to the Gould and Audubon Societies, the professor grew even more puffed up and pompous. Soon he was as stuffy and incomprehensible as all the other academics at Oxford, at which stage the English decided he was as close to being an Englishman as he was ever to get and that it was time to grant him full citizenship. He accepted in the name of Russia and of Shakespeare.

  ‘The English are really Russians in disguise!’ he was fond of saying. ‘Shakespeare would have made an excellent Russian, make no mistakeski!’

  The professor also corresponded with Mrs Moses in Australia although his letters tended to be long and complex and, for the most part, contained questions about parrots, galahs, budgerigars and cockatoos. Mrs Moses took his letters down to the Bondi Pet Shop and asked Whacker O’Sullivan, its owner, for the information the professor required.

  Whacker would then scratch his head. ‘Never thought a flamin’ budgie was that complicated, Mrs Mo,’ he’d say and then he’d volunteer to ask a bloke at the Australian Museum who drank at the same pub as him. The man from the museum usually knew the answers and Whacker, who couldn’t remember his own name after a few beers, made the man from the museum write the information on the back of an empty cigarette pack.

  When Mrs Moses came into the shop the next day he’d take a roll-yer-own he’d pre-rolled out of the empty cigarette pack and, in a normal, casual sort of voice which disguised the fact that he was reading, told her what the cove from the museum had written down.

  After a few years, with Mrs Moses telling everyone about his expertise and with the professor himself mentioning his name as an authority on the parrots of the Antipodes in one of his famous bird books sent to Mrs Moses, Whacker O’Sullivan was considered to be a leading Australian expert on the genus.

  That is, until the expert from the museum died of cirrhosis of the liver and Whacker was forced into having amnesia, brought about, he insisted, by a punch in the head sustained in a pub brawl. ‘Me bird brain’s gorn, Mrs Mo, can’t remember a flamin’ thing about them cockies no more.’

  But at about the time Whacker O’Sullivan’s bird brain was irrevocably destroyed, the professor’s letters began to change. The Bolsheviks had taken over Russia in the 1917 Revolution and the Tsar and his family were murdered by the Reds, although their bodies hadn’t been discovered.

  The effect on the professor was profound. He lo
ved the Princess Tatiana like his own daughter and he took the news of her death very badly. He seemed to lose all interest in life and his morbid letters dwelling on the demise of the princess soon precluded any mention of parrots, cockatoos, parakeets, galahs or budgerigars. The feathers had been completely ripped out of the professor as he mourned for his lovely princess who could imitate all the bird calls in the world.

  After a while the professor’s letters took what seemed, at first, a turn for the better. He’d convinced himself, because the Russian royal family had not been found, that the Reds hadn’t killed them. And that they had been allowed to escape under the one condition that they never revealed their true identity to the outside world.

  Mrs Moses hoped that the professor would let it rest at that and resume his interest in birds. But this was clearly not to be the case, as a letter followed which told her that the professor had decided to dedicate the rest of his life to flushing out the Russian royals.

  Mrs Moses, reading between the lines, realised that the professor, who had always been a bit, you know, squiffy, had finally gone over the top and, to use her own expression, was now plain meshuga. So when Whacker O’Sullivan, who had kind of gotten used to feeling important when Mrs Moses brought the professor’s letters into the pet shop with her parrot questions, asked why he hadn’t written in quite a while, Mrs Moses confided that she was worried about her dear friend.

  Whacker, always a notorious stickybeak, badgered her for more information.

  Eventually Mrs Moses broke down and tearfully told Whacker how the professor had become obsessed with the notion that the Tsar and his family had escaped and were living incognito somewhere out of Russia. She pointed out in her somewhat broken English that this was a highly unlikely theory as you couldn’t go around hiding an entire Russian royal family without someone eventually cottoning on.

  Whacker thought about this for a while and then naturally he took the conundrum down to the pub with him. The way he told the story to the blokes in the pub, the Russian royal family had escaped the Reds but were all suffering from amnesia and were last seen boarding the boat in Southampton bound for Australia.

  ‘Crikey, we could have flamin’ royalty walking along Bondi Beach not knowing who the blazes they are!’ was how he ended his sad tale.

  While most of the drinkers thought this an unlikely story there were some who, while not being exactly intellectually challenged, were definitely on the stupid side. After a few more beers the rumour that the Russian royal family had been seen on Bondi Beach was taken home by every drunk with an Irish name in the pub, which meant practically everyone present after eight o’clock that night.

  By morning Bondi Beach was awash with the rumour and by noon everyone was looking at anyone they didn’t recognise as a local to see if he or she looked as though they might be a Russian. Not that anyone knew what a Russian was supposed to look like. ‘Sort of foreign-looking with heavy eyebrows and women with long plaits and dark eyes but who you can see aren’t, you know, your proper wogs. Oh yes, and wearing high boots with the bottoms of their pants tucked in.’

  Fortunately it was winter and there were only a few people on the beach. But by four o’clock that afternoon an Italian with dark, heavy eyebrows from Leichhardt, a near inner-city suburb, together with his wife and five children had been spotted paddling on the beach. There was also a pair of suspicious-looking knee-high boots on the sand nearby and the man had his pants rolled up to his knees. This was evidence enough and the Russian royal family was promptly rounded up by a big crowd of locals, who escorted the loudly protesting and gesticulating husband and wife and their five tearful children to the local police station.

  Whereupon Whacker O’Sullivan, stepping from the crowd, announced to Sergeant Bumper O’Flynn that the Ruski royals had been found wandering aimlessly along the beach, and that it was obvious they were suffering from amnesia and it was his civic duty to turn them in to the authorities.

  When Bumper O’Flynn looked a trifle doubtful, Whacker duly pointed out that he was an expert in memory loss and so should recognise the condition when he came across it. ‘Besides, can’t you hear them, they’re bloody speaking Russian, aren’t they, mate?’

  ‘Sounds more like Eye-talian,’ the police sergeant suggested.

  ‘Nah! It’s fair dinkum Russian orright, London to a bloody brick, mate!’Whacker insisted.

  As the Italian and his wife had not long arrived in Australia and couldn’t yet speak English, they were yabbering away in a Sicilian dialect, which naturally enough everyone now took to be Russian. As nobody could understand Russian, Mrs Moses was immediately sent for.

  In her traditional no-nonsense manner she soon got things sorted out and afterwards she got really cranky with Whacker O’Sullivan for creating such a ridiculous incident which, she claimed, brought shame on all the Russians in Bondi Beach, who were, of course, as far as anyone knew, only herself.

  Whacker, at heart a gentleman, was truly contrite and, in an effort to mollify Mrs Moses, offered to give the professor a sulphur-crested cockatoo, which he said would be delivered by a mate of his who was the second engineer on the Duke of York, a passenger steamer that sailed between England and Australia.

  Mrs Moses was much taken by this idea. With such a handsome bird as his companion, the professor might snap out of his morbid preoccupation with the death of Princess Tatiana. The cocky was duly delivered by Whacker’s engineer mate and a happy ending was hoped for by all.

  But it was not to be. The professor’s obsession grew worse. He had convinced himself that the Russian royal family had escaped and were living with their second cousin King George in Buckingham Palace as poor relations. Furthermore, that they were being kept in captivity against their will.

  Before he went completely crazy he wrote to Mrs Moses to say that the lovely white cockatoo with the brilliant yellow plumage was a most excellent friend and that it personally and continually strengthened his resolve to find the missing Russian royals and to expose the King of England. This was probably because Whacker, who was still far from convinced that the professor’s theory wasn’t correct, hadn’t told Mrs Moses that he’d taught the cocky to say, ‘The princess lives! The princess lives!’

  The ending is maybe sad and maybe not, it all depends on how you look at life. The professor, by now impoverished, spent the remainder of his days outside Buckingham Palace with a sandwich board draped over his ancient great coat. Painted on the board were the words: Free Russia’s royal family – The Tsar is a bird-watcher!

  Never separated from the professor was the beautiful Australian sulphur-crested cockatoo, who sat on his shoulder squawking, ‘The princess lives! The princess lives!’What’s more, every day, winter and summer, all the birds of England, the robins, wrens, thrushes, larks, sparrows and the rest of the birds of the air would come and visit, pecking at the breadcrumbs the professor would habitually rub into his beard. People would stop and watch in wonder and most would leave a coin in the old felt hat which lay at the professor’s feet. In fact, so popular a tourist attraction did the old man become that the hat filled with coins several times a day and the professor was forced to take a taxi to Barclay’s Bank every evening and then home to where he lived under Chelsea Bridge.

  When Professor Ivan Mikhaylovich Slotinowitz died in 1938 he received a splendid obituary in The Times of London. The obit mentioned in passing that he had left a bequest of ten thousand pounds towards building an aviary at the London Zoo.

  What with the Second World War and things, the bequest was sort of forgotten and it was more than twenty years later, with the interest on the original capital having accumulated, that the great aviary was commissioned by the custodians of London Zoo to be designed by Lord Snowdon. This, the professor would have liked a lot, Lord Snowdon having once been married to Princess Margaret, who is a distant cousin to Princess Tatiana.

  Oh yes, I almost forgot, the only condition attached to the bequest was that the aviary should contai
n, at the very least, one Indian myna bird, who would be responsible for running the joint.

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA AND THE BEDOUIN’S CAT SHOES

  Of Sophia Shebaldin what is there to say? The top letter writer of them all seemed to have been written out. All the letters she wrote for Cleopatra’s Cat to her children must have cured her of letter writing forever. Perhaps, with all that had happened to her, just the mere act of writing a letter brought back too many painful memories. The news Mrs Moses received of her was secondhand and not very much at that. It came from the professor, who wasn’t very good at gossip or remembering the things women wanted to know. He had accompanied Sophia Shebaldin to England and had also managed to find her a ginger kitten, the pick of a litter belonging to a ginger tabby, a longtime resident of Magdalen College, Oxford. True to her word, Sophia christened it Sir Frederick Treves, purchased a cat basket at Liberty’s, and bought a second-class cabin ticket on a steamer bound for Port Said.

  The first news of her continued existence came five years after the First World War when Colonel Lawrence of Arabia was interviewed by the BBC radio program, ‘Traveller’s Tales’. The interviewer, perhaps hoping to get the program under way in a controversial way, remarked on the fact that Lawrence was wearing a most curious-looking pair of open sandals in the middle of an English winter.

  Lawrence laughed. ‘Oh, you mean my cat shoes.’

  ‘Do you have a problem with your feet, Colonel Lawrence?’ the BBC man inquired. ‘Perhaps a legacy from fighting in the desert with the Bedouin tribesmen?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! In fact, entirely the opposite is the case,’ Lawrence exclaimed. Then he told the story of how he had been presented with the sandals by an elder among the Bedouins. ‘The sandals he gave me were quite different from the ubiquitous Egyptian toe sandal,’ Lawrence explained, adding that his Bedouin host had called the sandals ‘cat shoes’, and it was obvious that they were held in high regard by the old Arab.