It was only late in life that I learned the simple lesson that history is merely anything that can happen. In my youth, in my art school painting days, I carried a Spenglerian Weltanschauung as big as a truffled goose. The things I loved then, those that excited me, seemed to impress no one else; the forms and colors of my life that dazzled me were gray and shapeless to everyone who politely stopped to look at them.
But I am wrong, there was one person who took an interest in me. An old Russian priest I met when I was in Budapest trying to talk Hungarian to the pretty girls (“Te egy igen szép lány vagy!“—“You're a very pretty girl.” “Menjen el tölem!”—“Scram, you bum!”).
He was a bread-eating, bread-blessing priest with a long beard, and he really believed that a fear of wealth was as bad as a fear of poverty. I used to meet him once a year at the Miklos Horvath Bathorys', who were related to the Sandor Hunydadys, who had a son I used to eat truffled capon with and drink Beaujolais with in Paris (but that's another story)… Anyway, the priest used to come to the Bathorys' once a year to bless the food… the suckling pig, köménymag leves (caraway soup), maj gomoc (liver dumplings), and korozott liptoi cheese… Father Aleksander Dragomiroff Panin. He looked like a bad Russian opera given by students of a home for the feeble-minded. He had one joke: he couldn't stand the singing in Boris Godunoff… “Why?” you would ask… “Because,” Father Panin would grin, “it isn't godunoff for me!” (His only English.)
I remember one day I was trying to become a writer and Father Panin found me at a café trying to finish a story, and he sat down and pulled on his beard.
“You are in trouble?”
“It is hard to find words to write.”
“It always is. Even Tolstoy… but enough of Tolstoy… They have a good wine here.”
We had some of the wine and he looked over what I had written and he said something I have never forgotten. “A book is easy… try to write a great line. That is rare. Anyone can write a book, but how many have written one great line that the world repeats over and over again?”
We ordered more wine and I tore up my story and I said I lacked the guile to be a writer, and Father Panin said that men without guile were men without talent and I was full of guile… full to busting!
“Look, my son, you want a story? I will give you one…”
Next door they were playing something fierce on an old mechanical piano… those oversweet Strauss waltzes with much Schlamperei. Father Panin frowned.
“Come home with me, and we will talk. Thank the good Lord my wife is deaf, and no longer listens.”
He lived in Buda, the wrong side of the river, up three flights of stairs, with a fat wife who was not so deaf as she made out to be and could cook like an angel… a Russian church angel of course, though I do think she was a Lith or Balt or Finn, one of those races that Father Panin lumped together as “small Russians.”
“These Hungarians, Stephen…”
“What about them?”
“They have so little culture to offer.”
“In Hollywood the Hungarians wait until Molnar has written a play, then they all celebrate and steal the first act.”
“What do they do with it?”
“They sell it to the studios. The Hungarian first act is a product of Hollywood, like Garbo…”
“The Hungarians are lucky to find a place like Hollywood for their first acts… but here I like it because you can get köménymag leves—caraway soup.”
“It is good and it is bad.”
“Here it is good,” and Father Panin's wife came in with a steaming bowl and ladled it out with a small, pint-sized scoop, into plates big enough to hold St. John's head.
Köménymag leves is not as easy to make as it sounds… yet any one can make it with a little courage and a firm hand. Take two generous tablespoons of goose fat, melt it, and add a half cup of white flour, stirring constantly. Stir until a golden brown, and add 6 cups of water into which you have mixed a big pinch of salt and the juice of one lemon. Get an ounce of caraway seeds, and chop fine a little parsley. Add this to the mixture. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes. Make rye or corn bread croutons, very crisp, and serve… köménymag leves!
Add a fött gyümölas of stewed fruit Hungarian, in season, and life can be very wonderful. We ladled up our soup and gave thanks to fat geese… and Father Panin said a prayer for all good creatures who feed us.
After the meal I gave Father Panin a cheap German cigar, part of it pure tobacco, I was told.
He lit his cigar… pulled his beard to one side (to protect it from sparks)… and smiled.
“I will give you a story, such a story that you will become famous overnight. It will not be easy… but then when it is over, the story will write itself. You have been to Rome?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, good. You like children?”
“I'm polite to them.”
He thought a while. “Saturday you leave for Rome. Listen to an old man… you go to Rome.”
“But how?”
“Your way is paid. Second class including meals.”
“But why?”
“You want to write… Have you no adventure? Motga, the wine!”
The wife was deaf to the plea, so he had to get it himself. “Listen, my son. If you have not got the spirit of adventure, you will never write. Do not ask, take. Do not brood, think. The world is waiting to open its secrets to you. Do not even ask… it can't help rolling at your feet if only you are not blind.”
I smiled. “You're a jewel smuggler.”
Father Panin shook his head. “What cheap reading you do. I give you nothing, not even a letter. All I say is… be on the Rome train Saturday. A place will be held.”
“No.”
Father Panin poured the last of the wine into glasses. “Better get an easy job someplace. A clerk in a leather shop… maybe you can keep books… perhaps someone in America could use you to herd cowboys.”
“One just herds the cows… the cowboys are the herders.”
“Anything but a creative artist. You have good intentions and no desire to carry them out.”
The priest looked at me. He wore a great nose like a great man, and I had a sudden impulse to trek and migrate towards water and Scotch at the English Club. His wife came in, the views and crowfeet of discouraged beauty on her honest face… and she picked up the empty wine bottle and went out. It was warm in Buda, and outside the window the ghostly pawing of moths filled the hot night.
I stood with dignity. “I'll be on the train.”
He smiled at me and held his stomach. “I have eaten too much. Ah, for the simple life. An Athenian meal of a few olives and the head of a fish. Bleak thinking, Stephen, austerity in furniture, a small diet are the greatest gifts we deny ourselves…”
“I said I'd be on the Rome train.”
He was looking at a still-life painting I had given him. “We deviate from the nature of things and call it art. I must go now to the Russian bath.”
I knew his only hygienic ritual was to make a face at himself in a bathroom mirror, but I could see he wasn't going to talk about the Rome train again. I went home and packed…
Saturday came, and I was at the station feeling a perfect damn fool. Priests always got me. I was the prey of credulity and suspicion. There was a place for me on the train. The train started. I sat forward, watching the river divide Buda from Pest, and after a while the train general or admiral (he had enough gold braid for it) came in, leading a small six-year-old boy by one hand. He was a handsome child with blue eyes and golden hair left a little too long.
The admiral bowed. “This is Egon Zelsmith.”
“Who?”
“Me,” said the child.
The admiral nodded. “Father Panin said you are escorting him to his mother in Rome.”
“Wait!” But the admiral had gone, and Egon sat facing me, his legs crossed, kicked his socked feet into space… He was a very handsome child.
“You live in Rome, Egon?”
Egon handed me a letter. It was from Father Panin.
Dear Stephen, You are blessed with youth and health, and you are curious about life. It is easy to be curious… but to show real interest in anything—that takes knowing. Egon is a good child. Deliver him to his mother at the Hotel da Fabriano. Bless you, my son, and may you find your story. In beato omnia beata…
Father Panin
I tore up the note and ordered lunch. Egon had never been in Rome. His mother he said he had never seen. He had been brought up in a school. One day Father Panin came to the school and said he was going to Rome to see his mother.
I wondered what kind of story I was going to get out of this thing. Was Egon's mother an international spy? Did she dress in black net and wear big picture hats and did strong men tremble at her smallest whim? Would sinister figures follow us to Rome? Was I in danger of my life? Why wasn't I armed? Who was Father Panin? Egon, was he boy or midget? His baggage was one small hat bag of battered leather. Did it contain a human head? Nonsense!
Of course, it contained something valuable. Perhaps the Medici head… a jeweled bust of Pope Leo… made by Cellini, now lost for many years… stolen. It could be. I lit a fresh pipe and wondered if Egon's mother was a blonde. Would she try and use me as tool in her game… whatever it was?
The tobacco tasted good, the train ran. Egon came to me.
“Could I go to the sandbox?”
“Sandbox?”
“That's what we called it in school.”
I took him to the little boys' room. I looked over the train. Many sinister faces filled the train. They could be anything. Jewel crooks, spies, Greek gun kings, white slavers, and of course just people; but I hated to admit the last.
All night I dreamed of dreadful exciting things. By morning I decided Egon's mother was a well-made red-head with eyes that drove men mad. Even Egon looked better in the morning… he was painting his name with toothpaste on the train window. I pitied the squalid contentment of peasants that the train ran past. I dreamed of adventure, of cold austere beauty like cream-colored ceramic sculpture. Then we were near Rome, grass biting upward on old ruins and turning to ivy on the towers, and beggars standing, peddling trash, with the red, bare, rheumatic feet of parrots.
I took a taxi to the hotel. It was a shabby, run-down place. A man tried to steal my bag. I told him to scram you bum, in impeccable Italian; he turned out to be the hotel clerk.
Egon's mother was out. She was, he said, a bareback rider in a small circus touring the outskirts of Rome. Very clever, I thought… till I saw her. She was a faded, tired girl, with tired eyes and red, swollen hands. She was very shy.
“You are Egon?” she said to the boy.
“I am Egon,” said the child.
“You are kind,” she said to me.
“I guess so,” I said. “Tell me, do you know Father Panin well?”
“No… his name was given to me by people who sell tickets and bring children to their parents. He is their agent in Budapest.”
“Did it cost much?” I asked her.
“I have been saving for two years to bring Egon to me. My husband he died, a fall from the high wire… but now we are together. Egon and myself. Poor but together.”
I lied. “There is some of your money left over… enough for a dinner. I would like to take you and Egon out to dinner.”
“But you must not spend too much.”
Egon said, “Where is the sandbox?”
“What?” asked Egon's mother.
“Let me,” I said, taking Egon by the arm…
We had dinner that night after the show. Egon's mother wasn't a very good bareback rider. She tried hard, and it was not much of a circus… but she really wasn't very good.
Egon and his mother ate as if they had been hungry a long time. I am sure they had been. I was so angry at Father Panin that I ordered a Moët and Chandon wine to cheer us up. It held us fine until the main dish came.
I suppose I should have been too angry to enjoy it… but I enjoyed it very much. Egon had two helpings and he had learned to call the sandbox the powder room; after all, I couldn't always be with him…
For some reason Egon's mother wanted frogs' legs American. She had once heard of them from her husband who claimed to have eaten them in Texas…
“You are sure Texas?”
“He was there with a big show.”
“But frogs' legs. Americans don't eat them much.”
“Then perhaps we will have the lamb.”
But it was my night to howl, so I went to the waiter-and-owner of the little Roman eating place and I asked him if he had frogs' legs and he said yes… and I asked him if he would like to see them made American… and he said what the hell and the Virgin Queen, it was all the same to him… So I went into the shoebox-sized kitchen, and created frogs' legs American. I helped myself to a few French touches and added something I had once had in the Maryland Tidewater country on the Eastern Shore.
Take six pairs of frogs' legs with the backs left on. Heat the legs in olive oil in a heavy skillet, add half a pint of chopped mushrooms, a little chopped chive, a garlic clove sliced thin, and two cloves. Sauté on a good steady flame. Add a cup of soup stock, season with salt and pepper, cover and cook until tender. Now mix a half cup of dry white wine and a little flour to a smooth paste. Pour this over the frogs' legs. After you remove the legs, beat up two egg yolks and a half cup of cream with what remains in the pan for a very fine sauce.
Texas, you don't know what you missed… unless Egon's father really did find something like it there.
Egon and his mother ate it and wiped up the remains with good white bread, and said they loved Texas, and loved the frogs' legs, and it was more fun than anything they had ever done. The owner of the place, of course, at once placed the dish on his menu, but I never met anyone who remembers it in Rome…
A week later I got a long letter from Father Panin. I will not give it all… just the part that matters. I still have it, that letter. It's a document no one could write the story of my life without…
Dear son (it says in part), You are twice blessed. You have done an old man a great service and you have, I hope, learned some wisdom. Matters of natural human understanding have little in common with professional philosophy, as you can now see. You took a trip and you must now be asking yourself… where is the great story I was promised? Where indeed? The theorists and the dogmatists have led us so long by the nose that we see only what they want. Your great story you wrote the nights you waited to get to Rome. What did you think you would find? What did you imagine waited for you in Rome? Nothing? Then you will never be a writer, and the trip proved it for you. You thought of many mad things, my son? Write one down… dress it up, make it charming, you have written your first book. I am no critic (where is there any place a statue to a critic?) but if you dreamed deep enough you have a good story. To grow is easy, except inwardly; in time you will dream better and write better stories. Forgive a poor old man who needed some money quickly and used you; after all you used me too… You tried your ideas on me. Juvante Deo. Frustra laborat qui omnibus placere studet…
Father Panin
I was very angry for a month. Then Egon's mother needed a warm winter coat, and I sat down and wrote a detective story about the famous Medici mask made by the great Cellini. If you were unlucky enough to read it, you read my first published work, under the pen name of Paul Haggard. The last time I saw Egon he was learning to write his name in the snow…