Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 4

one. On the 11th March I got a postcard from a
Japanese penfriend of mine, an otolaryngologist. He has written:
"Thank you for your nice short story. I enjoyed ’The Norwegian Bible’
very much. I now understand you have inherited your multilingual
ability from your ancestors, your grandparents. Please write another
version of this story. Suppose you steal the Bible. I am sure Christ will
be pleased. Anyway, I think you have a great talent for story telling.
Please continue to write!" Nice words, aren’t they?
> A librarian colleague in the Hungarian National Library: "It’s a new
fresh librarian writer. Don’t you want to join our new founded
International Reading Association? Our first meeting will be on March
29th."
> An old English speaking uncle from the U.S.A. He emigrated there
seventy years ago with his parents. After getting my Christmas card he
posted an English Bible: a copy of the Revised English Bible (Oxford,
1989) immediately by courier post. I got it in three days time. I think he
thought: "My poor niece, she has no Bible to read, that’s why she has to
steal one."
> Perhaps the same idea occurred to one of our Finnish friends, an
otolaryngologist, because he sent me a tri-lingual
(Finnish-Swedish-English) New Testament.
> Another otolaryngologist, an excellent professor, very intelligent,
who has got a good sense of humour, sent a message. I like him very
much. He falls too into the circle with whom I cultivate friendships
through exchanging greeting cards on Feasts of Tabernacles. He
operated on my ear: he did an ear drum transplant on my left ear.
During my operation he sang a Protestant psalm for me that I could
hear through the veil of the partial sedation of the anesthesia. He cured
my ear, so it became waterproof again. I wrote him a grateful card after
finishing the Lake Balaton cross-swimming competition where I could
cover the five kilometer without a swimming cap and earplugs. His
remark on my book was the following: "Why didn’t you steal it? It is
not a sin to steal flowers, kisses and books."
> An old country woman, our godson’s grandmother. Her name is Pap
Lászlóné Pap Emma. "Pap" means minister in Hungarian and both her

maiden name and husband’s name is "Pap". She wrote me: "Dear
Iluska, although I am the daughter of a minister and the wife of a
minister at the same time, I can not write such a nice short story.
Congratulations."
> The last one in this list, another otolaryngologist, the fourth
laryngologist, but the most important among them for me was my
husband, a fifty-four year old marathon runner. He never praises me.
The red bunch of roses, mentioned later, was the only one, the only
time he presented me with flowers in my life. After eating my Sunday
dinner, which I cooked first of all for his taste, he never says: "it was
marvellous", but he says: "it was edible". But he inspires me with his
negative approval. His opinion about the short story: "Don’t believe
yourself to be a writer. It is the second novel or short story which
makes the writer a real writer, because the first book is on his or her
life--and everyone has a life. To discover the second story is the art. So
I am waiting for your second short story."
At the end of my essay I would like to write about a lost Norwegian
Bible and one that was never sent.
As I mentioned before, it was our assignment in the second year
Russian teacher’s retraining course to write a short story then to write a
literary analysis on our own work. It is nice, interesting homework,
isn’t it?
All of the students in our group wrote interesting stories, then we read
them aloud during the next lesson. We had to hand in the stories and
the analyses to our professor who promised to correct them and give us
a mark for them at the end of the semester. And besides all of these to
give the stories to a jury consisting of teachers who were native
speakers. The best three would be published in a library bulletin of the
Teacher’s Training College. At the last lesson of the semester she gave
all of us the best marks and said, "Good bye". At that time we thought
she had not even read our work and was not interested in our analyses
and that nothing would come of the short-story-writing competition.
In February I found an essay-writing competition in England, so I
thought I needed my analysis because I wanted to collect materials
connected with "The Norwegian Bible". I admit I am very untidy and
disorderly. I found only the first page of my manuscript among my
papers