The Twelve Little Cakes (12 page)

“Maybe they weren't home,” my mother said.

“Of course they were!” my sister said angrily. “The lights were on in all of their houses!”

My dad climbed out of the ditch and staggered over. He was covered in mud from head to toe.

“Well?” he said expectantly.

“I went to every single one of the neighbors, Dad. Nobody answered. The only people who came to the door were the old ladies, but their sons are all in Prague. No one wants to help us.”

“You went to the Acorns and the Haseks?” my father said incredulously.

“Yes. Their lights were on, but they didn't answer the door,” my sister said.

My father's eyes were bright yellow. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“I see,” he said quietly.

“So we're on our own, then,” my mother sniffed.

“That's right. We're on our own,” my father growled.

He threw a muddy arm around my mother's waist and pressed her tightly against his chest, and without saying another word, he turned on his heel and went back to his drains.

 

 

THE DAYS RUSHED BY IN A BLUR. My sister and I must have bailed several swimming pools' worth of water out of the kitchen, and my mother dug ditch after ditch until the mud eventually stopped closing up behind her. My father worked like a madman, shoveling clay until the sky finally cleared. Drawing on a startling reserve of energy, he single-handedly battled the forces of nature to stop our house from collapsing, and in the end the flood abated and the underground creek soaked back into the ground. Our house stayed firm on its foundations, which was more than we could say for the backyard. Every single flower bed and shrub had been carried away by the mudslide, and the fence at the bottom of the yard was ruined. Stones from my mother's rock garden jutted out at all angles from a thick crust of mud, and the sand and cement powder had fused together into a solid block of concrete. Our initial joy at overcoming the flood was replaced by numb disbelief at the sheer size of the loss. It would take weeks of digging and cleaning and salvaging before we would be in a position to continue building, and there was no way we would finish the roof before winter.

We spent the next couple of days recovering. My father lay under the piano for a very long time, until the smell of the mud drove him back into action. The kitchen and Mr. Kozel's apartment were covered in a rich layer of clay and dirt, and a thick organic stench permeated the whole house. My mother and Klara washed and scrubbed the downstairs walls, but the real problem was the backyard. It looked and smelled terrible.

My father came outside and lit himself a cigarette.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “one of the things I've always wanted to do is make the backyard flat. I never liked the way it sloped down the hill. The way it is now, we could probably level it out without too much trouble. What do you think?”

My mother looked at him as though he was insane.

“My rose garden!” she spluttered. “My peach and lemon trees!”

“We'll plant new ones,” he said decisively. “If we could get a spade truck down here before the clay hardens, we could dig the yard out further, make the whole thing nice and level, and then plant a layer of topsoil above it.”

“Would that be difficult?” my sister asked him.

“Not really. The main thing is to get on top of it quickly. I'll nip down to the pub and try to find a few workers, and then I'll see if I can borrow a spade truck from one of the cooperatives in Radotin.”

“Do you think they'll lend you one?” my mother frowned. “After the floods, I'm sure all the cooperative trucks will have been spoken for. You'll be lucky if you can find one, let alone get one for free.”

“I have a couple of leads,” my dad said cheerfully. “There's one old farmer in particular who owes me a favor. Now might be a good time to collect.” He reached down and ruffled my hair. “Would you like to come to the pub with me?”

“Which one?” I said nervously.

“The Hotel Kazin,” my father smiled.

There were three pubs in Cernosice: the Hotel Slanka, the Under the Forest Pub, and the Hotel Kazin, which literally translates as the “Rotten” pub.

In Czech,
kazit
means “to rot,” so
kazin
is technically a place where rotten things are kept. Appropriately enough, the Rotten pub was where the town's National Committee staged its Communist events. It was a large and popular hotel, featuring two bars, a restaurant, and a small ballroom at the back. On Friday and Saturday nights there was a disco for young people, but the social core of the Rotten Pub largely consisted of the correct-line Communist families who had been running the town since the 1948 putsch.

I understood, from a very early age, that my family wasn't welcome at the Hotel Kazin. It had to do with my parents' expulsion from the party. After the Czech cabinet signed the normalization agreement endorsing the Red Army's invasion in 1968, my father resigned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in protest and disgust. He joined my mother at the Economic Institute and worked there for six months, until the institute's normalization committee called him in for an interview and presented him with a document similar to the one the Russians had forced our government to sign in Moscow. The document required him to agree that the progressive politics of the Prague Spring were counterrevolutionary and that a return to Soviet-style communism was in the country's best interests. My dad was interviewed by a seven-person committee that quietly and patiently laid out the terms of the document, read him a long list of all the people he knew who had already signed it, and told him, in no uncertain terms, exactly to which level of hell he would descend if he refused to sign.

My father had known that the committee would call him, and had plenty of time to consider his response. He had a wife and child to protect, and, more important, he had an insider's knowledge of the system. The committee didn't need to threaten him. He knew the dangers all too well. In spite of this, when the time came, he said simply, “No. I cannot possibly sign an agreement I don't agree with,” and from that day, April 13, 1970, he went directly to the underclass. He was expelled from the party, fired from the Economic Institute, and demoted from his rank of captain in the army. My mother also declined to sign and was expelled from the party shortly after my dad, but she kept her job at the institute because her bosses weren't sure how much influence she had with the Red Countess. She was tolerated at work, but she made her coworkers nervous. In the strange psychology of the times, the small minority of dissidents who refused to sign the normalization agreement were really hated by the majority who signed. The Russians obviously had no business in our country, but the anger we felt at having to agree with their presence was quickly channeled politically and directed at easy targets. My dad had been an important man in Cernosice, but the second he was expelled from the party, the town wasted no time in aligning itself with the Red Countess. Even after we won our court case and Kveta had left town for good (to the town's great relief, it should be noted), the Communist families of Cernosice continued to shun my parents.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the Hotel Kazin. It was just around the corner from the National Committee Headquarters, and its front bar was the watering hole of the local Politburo. If you were part of the system, you could make your bureaucratic problems disappear at the pub. Failing that, you had to wait in line for hours at the National Committee, and if you were an enemy of the state, the hours could turn into days. There was nothing the town bureaucrats loved more than trying to bury my dad in paperwork, but he was very good at working around them. He was also very intimidating. A well-known fact about my father was that you could only push him so far. If things came to a serious head, he would win at all costs, and very few people had the courage to confront him directly. He was denounced anonymously instead, and on the occasions where he knew who had informed on him, he would go to the Rotten pub for a beer and take his time drinking it. The front bar would become extremely quiet until he left.

We may have been unwelcome at the Hotel Kazin, but it was the one place where workers could be found at any given hour, so we drove down the hill and parked outside. My dad often took me along when he cut deals in town, because a man with a little girl beside him was a lot harder to refuse than a man without one. I had learned to sit still and not interrupt him as he talked. He had what we call in Czech a “sweet voice,” which was particularly deadly where women were concerned.

The front bar fell silent as we walked in. A small group of men from the neighborhood sat at a long table near the doorway, and they nodded apprehensively as my father growled hello. He walked over to the bar, ordered a beer for himself and a glass of lemonade for me, and then he made the extraordinary (but calculated) move of sitting down at the same table as the men. There was an embarrassed silence. The men studied their beer glasses and cleared their throats nervously.

“Heard you had some trouble with the rain,” one of the men ventured after the suspense became too great.

“That's right,” my father growled. “The house nearly slid down the hill. I was lucky to save it. And now I'm looking for a few men to help me save the backyard.”

The men squirmed in their seats. Almost in unison, they reached for their cigarettes and lit them, continuing to stare at their glasses while they smoked.

“I wouldn't expect you to do it for free,” my dad continued. “I can pay up to twenty crowns an hour.”

The men's eyes widened imperceptibly. A few of them appeared to consider the offer. But the word of our damaged garden had obviously spread. No one was in any hurry to volunteer for such a labor-intensive job.

My father watched the men impassively.

“Okay.” He put his beer glass on the table. “Thirty an hour. That's my final offer.”

His face betrayed nothing, but he was offering more money than we really could afford. The going price for labor was fifteen crowns an hour, so my father was being uncommonly generous. If the men were to accept, my mother would have to start serving our meals on saucers.

“We'd like to help you, Jarda,” the man who spoke first said cautiously. “But we have our own work to do. The rain has damaged our houses as well, and we're really very busy.”

“Terribly busy,” the other men muttered.

“No offense or anything,” the first man said hastily. “It's just, you know, there's lots of work to be done.”

“Lots and lots of work,” the other men agreed.

My father looked at the row of empty beer glasses in front of them, and snorted mirthlessly. “I see,” he growled. “Well, I guess I'd better let you get on with it then.”

We returned to the car and drove back up the hill, and my dad went out into the backyard and stared at the trees. The forest side of our garden was lined by a thick row of trees inside the fence. The fence had a side gate that we hardly ever used, and my dad lit a cigarette and squinted thoughtfully at the gate and the trees. After a few minutes of smoking and squinting, he went up to the garage and came back with a tape measure. He got me to hold the end of the tape for him and we walked from one tree to the next, measuring the space between them.

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“I'm deciding which tree to cut down,” he explained. “If no one wants to help us, I'll do the work myself. All I have to do is find someone willing to lend me a spade truck, and then I can ask Tomas Glatz if I can borrow his chain saw. After that, it's simply a matter of cutting down this tree so we can drive the truck into our yard.”

He slapped the trunk of a big silver yew that was actually the nicest tree in our garden. A woodpecker had made its nest inside the trunk, and I loved to listen to the hollow rat-a-tat-tat of its beak every morning. The flood had driven the bird away, but I hoped it might come back soon, and I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what would happen if the woodpecker came back and found his nest missing.

I voiced my concern at the kitchen table that evening.

“I wish you didn't have to cut down that tree, Dad. If the woodpecker comes back, he won't have anywhere to live.”

“You want to cut down a tree?” my mother asked.

“I don't have a choice,” my father shrugged. “The garden is completely fenced in. The only way I can get a spade truck into the yard is by chopping down the silver yew near the gate.”

My mother's eyes widened in horror. “The silver yew?” she cried. “That's my birth tree! My father planted it on the day I was born!”

“The firs and pines are too big to cut down,” my dad told her. “The yew is younger and it has a thinner trunk. It's the only tree near the gate that I can handle by myself.”

“The yew is younger because it was planted on my birthday!” my mother roared. “I would rather have a foul-smelling mud pile in the backyard than see you cut down that tree! You had better come up with another solution, Jarda Furman, because I'll divorce you if you so much as touch that silver yew! I'm serious! You leave that tree alone!”

None of us doubted that my mother was serious. She was gentle and sweet, but she was also very stubborn. Whenever she had her mind set on something, she would fight to the death before she compromised, and my father knew better than to argue with her at the table. It would have been easier to level the yard by hand than to talk my mother into changing her mind, so my father did what he always did, which was change the subject.

“The truck is the least of our worries,” he said. “The real problem is that no one wants to work. I think the word has got around that our backyard's a mess. The men at the pub were even shiftier than usual. They said no to thirty crowns an hour.”