The Family Frying Pan

by Bryce Courtenay

  The sandals, while being somewhat different in their strapping arrangement, more European in design than Arab, were most curiously different in the construction of the sole. For instance, the upper side of the leather sole was contorted or shaped with the arch built up on the inside of the instep so that the effect was to completely support the arch, the sandal seemed to naturally mould to the contour of the foot. Furthermore the upper side of the sole, that is to say the surface upon which the foot rested, was covered with hundreds of little leather nodules. This meant that when you slipped them on, it was somewhat disconcerting as the nodules pressed into the sole of the foot for a decidedly uncomfortable result.

  The old man had grinned knowingly when Lawrence, having slipped the sandals on, made a wry face as he attempted to walk.

  Lawrence knew he could not possibly reject the sandals, they were a gift not given lightly, nor could he refrain from wearing them for fear of insulting his host. So he was forced to make the best of a bad situation and to persevere with the strange footwear through one long, very hot day.

  That evening in the privacy of his tent he removed what he had come to think of in the course of the day as his torture sandals, an example of yet another of the many crosses he was obliged to bear in the name of good Anglo–Arab relations.

  However, as he sat on his bedding to remove the footwear he realised that, curiously, since mid-afternoon he’d quite forgotten about their existence. Now when he’d removed the Bedouin’s cat shoes he realised that his feet seemed much less tired than usual. The camel he had been riding that day had developed a limp and he had been obliged to walk a great distance across the hot sand, and now, surprisingly, his feet felt better than he could ever remember.

  When the opportunity arose, Lawrence of Arabia asked his Bedouin host about the sandals, thinking them to be some ancient secret of Bedouin leather craft. Instead he was told that the sandals were made by a Russian woman who lived alone with a red cat in the small town of El Burumbul, some two hundred and fifty kilometres from Cairo. The Bedouin elder then went on to tell Lawrence of Arabia the curious tale of the origin of the cat shoes.

  One day, several years previously, a young Bedouin goat herd had badly sprained his ankle while chasing a goat and was in such terrible pain that he was quite unable to walk. After dragging himself along for some distance he was finally overcome by the heat and lay helpless in the blistering midday sun. He wasn’t anywhere near the Bedouin camp and was also without water, having removed the goatskin gourd strung across his shoulders so as to make it easier to chase the goat. Now as he lay in a delirium, where he would certainly have perished in a few more hours, a strange woman, a white woman wearing a large straw hat, suddenly emerged, seemingly out of nowhere. She lifted the young boy onto her back and carried him more than a kilometre to a small mud hovel, taking the urchin into the dark, cool interior of her home. She bathed his forehead until he became conscious, then she commenced to work on his sprain. So effective was her treatment that by evening, with the help of a stick, he was able to return to the camp, to the great joy of everyone, around midnight.

  The goats had returned at sunset of their own accord and the boy’s family and other members of the tribe had immediately set out to look for him. They were hampered by a new moon but eventually they came upon his water bag and judging from its contents they decided the lad had not taken water since about ten that morning. From this fact they concluded that if he was not dead by now he would be wandering in the desert quite delirious. They had reluctantly returned home, having given him up for lost. In fact, the Bedouin women had already begun their keening, knowing that if he was not already dead, the night, when the temperature often gets down below freezing, would finish him off.

  Without water or the means to make a fire, the young goat boy would most certainly perish. In the morning they would watch the sky for circling vultures so that they might find his body to bury it. ‘There had been,’ the old Arab said, ‘great rejoicing when the boy entered the camp with the stars at the zenith.’

  The following day his father had gone to the woman’s tiny house to thank her for his son’s safe return and, as a token of his gratitude, he had presented her with a small sack of dates and dried apricots. The woman, who had not covered her face at his approach and who seemed not to understand why he had come, at first refused the gift. But when he had insisted, even showing some anger at her refusal, she had changed her mind. Then, much to the man’s embarrassment, she had neutralised his gift with a pair of curious-looking sandals, pressing them into his reluctant hands and then pointing to his feet.

  Like Lawrence, the man could not refuse her gift without insulting the white lady who, though an infidel, had saved his son’s life. So, he had returned with them to the camp where he told of the red cat and the woman infidel, who wore a great hat of plaited grass and dared to show her face to a male stranger.

  Everyone shook their heads in dismay at the woman’s boldness of manner, but then had enjoyed a good laugh at the notion of the ridiculous-looking sandals. More in jest than anything else, and because he had supplied them all with a great deal of entertainment, the boy’s father, thinking to stretch the attention he had received a bit further, had worn the strange sandals for a few hours. Like Lawrence, he discovered that the sandals possessed some sort of magic healing power.

  To cut a long story short, all the Bedouins started wearing them. Soon the strange lady with her red cat had a small but thriving business going among the tribesmen.

  The Bedouin elder spread his hands and gave Lawrence an almost toothless smile, ‘That is the story of your sandals, Lourens effendi. We still get the cat shoes from this white woman with the red cat.’

  Lawrence was aware of the ability of the Bedouins to fashion almost anything with their hands. ‘But why do you not make them for yourselves?’ he asked.

  The elder looked shocked. ‘You do not understand, Lourens, it is the red cat, the magic red cat. Have you seen how a cat walks, silent, perfectly balanced, as though on air? Acat’s paws are always cool, it is the same with the cat shoes the woman makes, there is magic in them, a magic we cannot copy for fear of Allah’s wrath that we should steal an idea from an infidel.’

  Lawrence of Arabia then told the man from the BBC how he took the sandals back to England, where he wore them increasingly until the idea of wearing a sensible pair of English brogues became anathema to him. He had come slowly to realise that what happened to your feet largely decides the degree of your general wellbeing. He told the man on the radio that his cat shoes proved to be almost indestructible and when the soles wore thin he simply resoled them. Now the cat shoes were simply the footwear he preferred and, as often as not, he wore them with a collar and tie and his Sunday best suit. The local people in the village in which he lived eventually came to accept the sandals as a sign of his growing eccentricity. That is until a chance conversation occurred between himself and a visiting Swiss chiropodist.

  It seemed a certain Dr Scholl had come to visit a neighbour and had been introduced to Lawrence. The foot doctor had noted Lawrence’s sandals and, like the BBC man, had questioned why he preferred to wear them. Lawrence had removed a sandal, or cat shoe as he called it, and handed it to the famous chiropodist, at the same time vouching for its efficacy.

  The Swiss foot doctor had asked if he might see both cat shoes and then examined them with great interest, rubbing his thumb up and down the hundreds of tiny leather nodules that covered the surface of the inner sole.

  ‘It is so obvious!’ he exclaimed in a surprised voice. ‘So very obvious!’ He clapped his palm against his forehead, ‘Why did I not think myself of this?’ He looked up at Lawrence, ‘My dear Colonel Lawrence, are you aware that every nerve in the human body ends in the feet?’ He ran his thumb over the myriad little nodules again, ‘These sharp little bumps seem to act as a constant massage, stimulating the blood flow through the feet and up into the body.’

  He returned the sandals
to Colonel Lawrence and, removing his glasses, began to polish them nervously with a clean white handkerchief that he produced from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Wunderbar! Wonderful!’ His eyes positively shone. ‘Ja, we shall see what I can do with this idea! You are a genius, Colonel Lawrence!’

  ‘Not me, my dear fellow, some Russian woman in the Arabian desert who lives with a ginger cat, she’s your genius.’

  Sophia Shebaldin was never heard of again, but around the mid-1930s the Bedouin were observed to no longer wear cat shoes. One can only surmise that she must have passed away and that the tribesmen were too superstitious to copy her magic sandals.

  As for Dr Scholl, the chiropodist who had visited Lawrence? His is by now a well-known success story.

  Of Sir Frederick Treves, the ginger cat, nothing is also known. Except that if you should visit the pyramids in El Giza, you will notice the presence of a great many cats which, since time out of mind, have been regarded by Egyptians to be sacred animals. It is surprising how many of these creatures are distinctly ginger in colour.

  THE MECHANIC AND THE MAID FROM THE ASTRA HOTEL

  I have left the story of what happened to Mr Petrov of the beluga caviar fame until last, not because it is the most dramatic story of them all, but because it is the one that affects me the most.

  As was always expected, Mr Petrov made a bee-line for New York where he would meet his five sisters and his beloved Katya Markova of the scorpion sting.

  But perhaps the scorpion had left some of its nature behind in the poison it had injected into the slim and pretty ankle of Mr Petrov’s proposed bride. Because when he eventually arrived, he was met by his five sisters, who had waited for seven hours outside the immigration processing shed on New York’s Ellis Island to welcome their brother to America, but of Katya Markova there was no sign.

  Mr Petrov, always polite, held each of his loving sisters in his arms and amid copious tears they welcomed him to the land of the free. It was only after a long ride to the Lower East Side in a modern internal-combustion motor called an omnibus that he asked about Katya Markova.

  For some moments his sisters were silent, each reluctant to be the one to tell him but then the eldest, Nadia, spoke. ‘She met a banker named J.P. Morgan, Jnr,’ she said tentatively.

  ‘So who is this Morgan?’ Mr Petrov asked. ‘What has he done to Katya?’

  ‘She is his mistress!’ they all cried and then collectively burst into tears.

  ‘Mistress? What is a mistress?’

  ‘His fancy woman,’Nadia said quietly.

  Mr Petrov could hardly believe his ears. ‘But she is promised to me, we are betrothed.’

  ‘This is America, my brother, the old rules do not apply here,’ Nadia answered, averting her eyes from those of her brother.

  ‘He is an old man of fifty years, he gave her a fur coat and a diamond ring!’ Natasha, the youngest, exclaimed. ‘She has also an automobile and a chauffeur and a nice brownstone house!’

  ‘I will kill him!’ Mr Petrov swore.

  But Mr Petrov did no such thing. Instead he got a job on the waterfront in the fish markets and found, increasingly, that while life in America was good, he kept thinking about Mrs Moses, who was no beauty like Katya Markova but with whom he seemed to have formed such a good partnership on the road.

  He also discovered that each of his sisters had a beau, as the Americans called it, a young man who sought their hand in marriage. They had all refrained from accepting the various proposals, waiting for their brother to arrive to give his permission and blessing to the match. Nadia, for instance, had waited nearly three years, much to the chagrin of the widower shopkeeper who was to be her intended.

  Mr Petrov could find no fault in any of the suitors and agreed that each of his sisters had his permission to wed. After all, he told himself, in Russia, with the furore over his so-called affair with Katya Markova and the spoiled caviar, they would have remained spinsters for the rest of their lives. Here in America they could start a new life and have families of their own.

  Nadia, despite being the first to find a sweetheart, was the last to wed, attending first to the wedding arrangements of all of her sisters and seeing that they brought a small dowry with them. Each had a traditional wedding in the Russian Orthodox Church in Stuyvesant and, although these were modest enough affairs, Mr Petrov had to work for three years to pay for the wedding feasts. Finally Nadia took the vows, though not before she told Mr Petrov that she was prepared to give up her fiancé if he required her to look after him.

  With all five of his sisters married and after five years in America Mr Petrov was drafted into the United States Army where they trained him as a motor mechanic and sent him to fight in France and Germany, where he was twice mentioned in despatches.

  Back in New York after the war Mr Petrov bought a small fish shop with a war veteran’s grant, but found he couldn’t settle down. Finally, he admitted to himself that he must act on something that had been scratching away at his heart ever since he’d come away from Russia. He sold the fish shop to an Italian migrant and had sufficient money for the boat trip to Australia and a handsome gold and diamond engagement ring.

  Three months later, with the waves lapping on the white sand, and just on sunset, he proposed to Mrs Moses while they were walking along Bondi Beach. Mrs Moses immediately accepted, she had always loved Mr Petrov but had never dared to think that he may have reciprocated her feelings.

  ‘Papa went on his knees,’ she’d exclaimed to me, ‘in the wet sand and he asked to marry me. I thought, “Oh my God! Maybe I die and gone to heaven already.”’

  Because Mr Petrov wasn’t a Jew they were married at the registry office in the city, where Whacker O’Sullivan was called upon to be the best man and chief witness. Almost all the Irish and, in fact, most of the permanent population of Bondi Beach came to the wedding, invited or not. A Russian-Irish-Australian wedding is no affair for the timid and a grand and somewhat drunken time was had by all. Well after midnight three local crims and the mayor of Waverley carried Sergeant Bumper O’Flynn home in a deck chair they’d collapsed to use as a stretcher.

  For a while Mrs Moses attempted to call herself Mrs Petrov, but as Mr Petrov called her Mrs Moses as did everyone else, she finally gave up and resumed her old identity.

  Immediately after the Great War there were plenty of jobs for blacksmiths in Australia, but from his very first ride in an omnibus in New York, Mr Petrov had fallen in love with the internal-combustion engine. His war experience had turned him into a first-rate mechanic and so, with Mrs Moses’s savings made as a cook at the Astra Hotel, Mr Petrov and Mrs Moses bought a tin shed at the corner of Curlewis Street and Campbell Parade and turned it into a combination garage and smithy.

  For several years they lived in two fibro rooms behind the garage until they had sufficient to buy a home on the point overlooking the beach. They were blessed with a daughter, who, because of a Jewish mother, retained her faith, maintaining it into her marriage. Her daughter too had a daughter, who eventually became my wife.

  I am the cook in our family and every Friday morning, just after dawn, I drive to the fish markets and buy a big snapper. By nine a.m. it is scaled, filleted and cooked, the head and the tail put aside for soup. People who try my fish often comment that it is quite the best they’ve tasted. I always thank them politely and then add, ‘I’m afraid it has nothing whatsoever to do with me, my fish is cooked in a frying pan possessed of a Russian soul.’