The small bilingual book began its own life. It became a mirror for me through which I could get to know my friends. They introduced themselves in the letters, telephone calls and private talks connected with my first "literary effort". Their reactions to my short story began to give birth to a larger story about my friends characteristics, their way of thinking and about the ties that connected them to me.
So here follows the many lives of "The Norwegian Bible":
In the previous semester at the Teachers Training College we had a task of writing a short story in English. I wrote one about my experience while visiting Norway. The short story follows below:
THE NORWEGIAN BIBLE
a short story by Ilona Kutas to my grandfather
The discovery of the marvellous world of languages is the great experience of my life. The motivation for this sprang from family roots. My maternal grandfather, a theological professor, had mastered eighteen languages. Language and religion were very important for him. He was not able to teach me German, Hebrew, Polish or English because I was only five when he died. I only feel somewhere in my genes that I should follow in his footsteps.
As a member of a librarian delegation I spent a week in Oslo. After the rich and interesting daily programmes I always ran back to my hotel room to spend the lonely evenings in the company of my new friend, an EnglishNorwegian bilingual Bible. I had found it on the night table on the first day when I entered the hotel room, my home for a week.
Perhaps it is common in the hotel rooms of Christian countries to have a Bible at the guests disposal. I experienced this custom for the first time in my life there in Oslo. Finding that Bible brought to mind remembrances of my childhood as well. As a daughter of a protestant minister, living at the parsonage until the age of sixteen, I used to go to church and read the Bible. During the next thirty years of my life, however, I had not even held a Bible in my hand.
A great game began. I read the English column of the page, compared it with the Norwegian column and, with the help of my past knowledge about the Bible, I began to understand the text and the Norwegian words of mixed English and German origins at the same time.
Day by day the Bible and I became closer and closer friends. I began to fear my impending separation from it.