The Twelve Little Cakes (10 page)

I never got to know my real grandparents very well, but in those early years of my life, the three old ladies who lived in my street did a wonderful job of making me feel loved.

THE LITTLE COFFIN

THE DAY OF WORK we lost when I ran away from home turned out to be a major set-back for my dad. At the end of July, all the tradesmen he had hired went back to their real jobs, and we spent the rest of the summer living in a house without a roof. The walls on the second floor were unfinished, and the naked truss looked like a skeleton picked clean. From the street, the exposed floor made our villa look like a doll's house, and my mother was particularly upset by the fact that our neighbors could see us using the bathroom. We hung up sheets to try and make it more private, but I actually loved having a bath in a bathroom with no walls. We would wait until the sun had set, and then we would take turns in the bath, sharing the water, because our boiler was broken. I would always get to go first, while the water was still hot, and there was nothing nicer than sitting in a warm bath, feeling the breeze against my neck and looking up through the rafters at the night sky overhead.

As the end of summer approached, my father had no choice but to finish the house by himself. He drove his taxi in the evenings, and his days were spent sourcing and transporting material (bricks and tiles were hard to come by), to rebuild the roof and attic on his own. My mother raced against time to complete her book, and the moment she finished, my dad conscripted her to mix mortar in his old cement mixer. Klara carried buckets of mortar up the scaffolding to where he was frantically laying bricks, and the remarkable thing was that he got his walls up faster than a six-man team of
melouch
workers. I was the only one who didn't have to work, until my dad saw me playing near the cement mixer one day and decided that I was old enough to help.

“Come with me,” he said. “I have something for you to do.”

He led me to a pile of old bricks from the demolished walls of the Nedbals' apartment.

“I'm running out of bricks and I don't have money to buy any more,” he growled. “But these old bricks are good. They're just covered with a bit of mortar. What I want you to do is try and knock the mortar off the bricks with a hammer, like this.”

He pulled a hammer out of his carpenter's belt and tapped off a chunk of mortar.

“Now you try,” he said.

He handed me the hammer and I gave the brick an enthusiastic bash, splitting it in half. My father took the hammer from me and gently demonstrated the best way to clean the brick.

“See?
Malinko a pomalinku,
” he smiled.

I made myself a seat using a piece of timber, and selected a brick from the pile. It took me a while to work out a good technique, but I eventually got the hang of it. By the time my mother called me in for my bath, I had a small pile of clean bricks to show her.

“I cleaned these all by myself,” I said proudly. “Look, I can do it with only one hit.”

I expertly tapped a brick with my hammer, making the mortar fall away like the shell off a walnut.

“Very impressive,” my mother smiled. “Dinner's nearly ready, so why don't you go up and get your father to run your bath?”

I trotted upstairs and found my father at work on the bathroom wall. He was smearing the last of his new bricks with mortar and tapping them into place with the handle of his hammer.

“Hello, Dad! I cleaned a lot of bricks.”

“Aren't you a good girl,” he laughed. “If I were the captain of a ship, I would sail the stormy seas with you as my first mate.”

I blushed with pride as he started my bath. A splutter of brown water exploded from the taps and my dad wearily sponged clean the bottom of the tub. Once the water had cleared, he plugged the bath and we waited a long time for the broken boiler to fill it. Dusk seeped through the valley. My father pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and laid it across a dusty pile of cement bags.

“Here. Sit on this,” he told me.

He sat on the cement bag next to me and lit himself a cigarette.

“Are you going to drive the taxi tonight?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he yawned. “But I'm going to try and finish this wall first.”

“Why did you want to make the roof more higher?” I asked. “I thought the house was nice as it was.”

“I'm not just making the roof more higher,” he replied. “I'm adding another floor to the house so that you and Klara can have your own bedrooms.”

“I'd like my own bedroom,” I told him.

“Well, you'll have one,” he said. “And it will have big windows you can look out and lots of space to play in. And in time, when you grow up, your children will have a place to live in as well. You see, I'm really building this house for you and Klara.”

“Did your parents build you a house, too?” I asked.

“No. They couldn't afford it,” my father replied. “They were very poor, but there was also a war going on and we spent many years living in a cellar. Have I told you this story?”

“No.” I loved it when my father told me stories.

“Well, we were invaded by the Germans before the start of the war, and they made a lot of their weapons in Czech factories,” he said. “So when the Allies started dropping bombs on Germany, they dropped a lot of bombs on us as well.”

“Did they drop bombs on you?” I asked.

“Not on me personally, but they dropped a lot of bombs on Ostrava,” he explained. “Your grandparents and I lived right next to a factory that the Allies were desperate to destroy. It was the Ritkers chemical plant that produced fuel for the German V1 and V2 missiles, and it was so full of rocket fuel and explosives, the Allies would have wiped out half the city if they had hit it.”

“You would have been blown up!”

“We were incredibly lucky,” my father said. “Whenever the sirens went off, the workers would set fire to a dozen barrels of tar, sending a cloud of black smoke above the factory. The English planes would arrive half an hour later, and they wouldn't be able to see anything, so they just dropped their bombs in the middle of the cloud. They must have dropped thousands of bombs above Ritkers, but for some reason they always missed.”

“Where did the bombs end up falling, Dad?” I asked. “Did they fall on anyone's house?”

“They fell on a middle-class neighborhood on the other side of the factory,” my father told me. “I'm sure the Allies didn't want to hurt these people, but hundreds and hundreds of families were killed. That's what war does, you see. It kills innocent people.”

He turned off the water and helped me take off my clothes. The evening breeze was cold, and my teeth chattered as he lowered me into the bath.

“How's that?” he asked.

“It's lovely and warm!” I squealed.

My father sat on the rim of the tub and lit another cigarette. His hands were dirty and he looked very tired.

“When I was growing up, my parents used to take me to Pisek for holidays every year,” he said reflectively. “We would catch the train from Ostrava to Prague, and then take the local train out to Pisek, passing through Cernosice along the way.”

He crumbled some dry mortar from his fingers.

“Every time we came through, I would look up at these hills,” he sighed. “I would stand next to the window and press my face against the glass. It seemed like such a nice place, especially compared to Ostrava, which was destroyed by the war and then ruined by the Russians. When I was a little boy, Cernosice looked like Heaven. From the moment I saw it, this was where I wanted to live.”

“What was Ostrava like?”

“It's a coal-mining town.There was a lot of coal in the ground that the Russians wanted, so they made our factories and mines work hard to produce it for them. After a while, it became unbearable. The trees and buildings would be covered in coal dust, and the streets would be so hot in summer, the tar would melt and stick to your shoes. You couldn't swim in the river because it was full of chemicals, and you couldn't walk across a bridge without holding your nose.”

“That doesn't sound very nice,” I said.

“It wasn't. It was a rough town full of poor people like my parents. You had to be strong to survive, and even stronger to get out. If there was one thing I knew when I was growing up, it was that I was going to get out as soon as I had the chance.”

He finished his cigarette and sent the glowing embers floating out into the darkness.

The sky had turned inky black, the moon and stars smothered by clouds. Dishes and cutlery clattered in the distance, and I could smell the sausages the Haseks were cooking next door. My father put a wash-cloth on his hand and gently soaped my back, and then he rinsed me, shook me dry, and wrapped me up in a towel. He helped me into my pajamas as my sister came up to take her turn in the bath. Then he went back to his wall, continuing to lay bricks in the semidarkness.

Klara inspected the bath, dipping her hand in the water.

“It's dirtier than usual,” she complained.

“Dominika has been helping me in the yard,” my dad told her.

“I cleaned a pile of bricks,” I announced to her. “I've become very good at hitting them with a hammer.”

“Great,” my sister said. “And now the water looks like coffee.”

“At least it's warm coffee,” my father growled. “It's cold and black by the time I get to it.”

Klara sighed and climbed in, while I put on my slippers and trotted down to the kitchen. My mother had just finished cooking
kulajda,
a traditional Czech meal of potatoes and hard-boiled eggs in white sauce. She had recently started serving our dinners on small plates to make them look bigger, and the delicious smell of the neighbors' sausages was often quite distracting. I loved my mother's cooking, though. She could make the tastiest of meals out of the plainest of ingredients.

We ate dinner together, and then my father attached the TAXI sign to his car and drove away to work the night shift in Prague. Every so often, Dad's schedule would become very frantic, and I would later learn that this was due to a small group of West Germans personally requesting him whenever they came to town. My father spoke fluent German and had dealt with many Germans during his government years, so whenever a visitor with dissident connections would come to Czechoslovakia, the network put him in touch with my dad and he would become their personal chauffeur. They paid in deutsche marks, which he could exchange on the black market, and often required him to shake off state secret security cars that were tailing them. Westerners were automatically tailed during communism. The secret police liked to lure them to hotels and photograph them in compromising situations. Dad was very familiar with the secret police, and was able to keep his German clients out of trouble.

After he had driven away, my mother led me upstairs to my cot in the living room, the only room in the house that wasn't under construction. It was crowded with furniture and all my mother's books, and there was so little space, my mother and father had to sleep underneath the piano. My cot was in the middle of the room, and I would fall asleep listening to my mum and Klara turn the pages of their books on either side of me. Around sunrise, I would hear my dad return home and crawl under the piano. The strings reverberated as he slumped beside the pedal stand, and the warm hum of the piano always made me feel safe. We had a great piano. It was the Red Countess's German Steinway grand, and was very rare, as most of the German Steinways had been destroyed during the war. After the court case, my mother expected the Red Countess to reclaim it, but moving the piano was too much trouble for her. So she left it in our villa, and it was the one expensive thing we owned. We were very poor when I was growing up, and selling the piano would have solved a lot of problems, but my mother wouldn't hear of it. It was the piano she had practiced on as a child, and was the one remaining link between her and her parents. She played it beautifully and sadly.

 

 

I HAD SUCH A GOOD TIME cleaning bricks with my hammer, I didn't want to stop. I worked at the pile every day for a week, and was so determined to clean every brick that my mother eventually had to send me out to play.

“I was just talking to Mrs. Liskova,” she said one morning. “And she tells me that the ladies have baked you a cake. But they're worried that you might not want to come around and eat it. They're afraid that you might be too busy to see them.”

“They baked me a cake?”

“Yes. They miss you,” my mother smiled. “They also said they would be happy to read you a story, but they're afraid that you might be too old for them to read to.”