The Twelve Little Cakes (14 page)

In the meantime, I helped my mother prepare lunch for the men. We set up a table in what had once been Mr. Kozel's living room, where the men could eat and drink beer with my dad. I carefully carried the small plates of sandwiches to the table and then I set the knives and forks, which was something I had recently learned to do. I had to stand on a chair to do it and was admiring my handiwork when I heard Mr. Moucha coming down from the roof. It sounded like he was shouting. When he was safely on the ground, I watched him remove his brand-new tool belt and throw it in the mud.

“I don't know which of you is worse!” he roared. “You”—he pointed at my dad—“for coming up with such an idiotic plan, or you”—he pointed at Mr. Pinos—“for going along with it! You guys are stark raving mad! I'm catching the train home, and don't bother coming to pick me up in the morning!”

Mr. Pinos tried to calm his comrade down, but it was obvious that Mr. Moucha had passed the point of no return. We went up to the garage and watched him storm off down the street. He really did seem very upset.

“Well, that's a shame,” my father said. “I quite liked Mr. Moucha. I liked both your colleagues, as a matter of fact. I do hope you'll be able to work with them again.”

“I hope so, too,” Mr. Pinos said grimly.

When Mr. Pinos knocked on our door the next morning, he made no pretense at smiling. He and my dad had spent a very tense couple of hours getting his truck out of the yard, and its doors had been badly scratched in the process. He had lost his coworkers and had made absolutely no progress ferreting out information for the STB, so my father decided to go easy on him. When I came out into the garden, I found them drinking beer and staring thoughtfully at the trees. It was ten o'clock in the morning.

“Hello, Mr. Pinos!” I said. “You're all by yourself today.”

“That's right, young lady.” Mr. Pinos sighed. “Never send a couple of boys to do a man's job.”

“Mr. Schlosarek and Mr. Moucha weren't boys,” I pointed out. “They were grown-ups like you.”

“Yes, but when the going got tough, they ran for their beds,” Mr. Pinos snorted. “At the end of the day, when you sign on for a job, delivering the goods is the only measure of how seriously you and your work can be taken.”

“Another beer?” my dad interrupted.

“Please,” Mr. Pinos said. “So you see, the reason my colleagues work for me instead of the other way around is simply because I see things through to the end. My reputation depends on it.”

He watched my father disappear into the kitchen.

“Your dad tells me he's been doing a lot of taxi driving lately,” he said casually. “I guess he sometimes brings people home with him late in the night, right?”

“Oooh! I have to go now!” I exclaimed, and ran inside the house.

For the rest of the day, my father and Mr. Pinos walked up and down the row of trees, drinking beer and discussing various strategies for getting the tractor in the yard. At one point, my dad went up to the garage and returned with Mr. Glatz's chain saw, and a lot of time was spent studying tree trunks and ferrying beer from the kitchen. By the early afternoon, Mr. Pinos's good humor appeared to have returned, and he and my father were in high spirits as they ate my mother's sandwiches. Empty beer bottles littered the garden, and while my dad hadn't made much progress solving the problem of the tractor, I did notice that he and Mr. Pinos kept coming back to my mother's silver yew. It was a pretty, slender tree that could be cut down very easily, and it was perfectly positioned in front of the side gate. The rest of the trees were much too big to control, and if they fell the wrong way, they could damage the house, whereas the yew could be cut in such a way that it would fall into the forest through the open gate. Mr. Pinos was very much of the opinion that this was the only way to solve my father's problem.

“I keep thinking I should take down the fence,” my dad muttered for the hundredth time.

“You're crazy!” Mr. Pinos told him. “Taking down the fence is a serious job, not to mention even trying to cut down one of those firs or pines. You'll wreck your house!”

“Or I'll wreck my marriage,” my father said ruefully. “I can't believe there's no other way around this.”

The two men continued to stare at the trees until the blare of a horn announced the tractor's arrival. We went up to the garage and found a massive flatbed truck reversing slowly up our street. Sitting on the bed was an extremely old tractor that looked like it hadn't been driven in years. My father had made two very long phone calls arranging to hire this semiderelict vehicle, and judging by the way the farmer had haggled, my dad had assumed he was dealing with a first-rate piece of machinery. He gaped at the tractor in astonishment.

“You've got to be joking,” he growled.

An old man and a teenage boy climbed out of the truck, and as the man wandered over to talk to my dad, the boy busied himself at the back of the flatbed, arranging a ramp for the tractor to drive down. As Barry and I watched, taking care to keep away from what was quickly shaping up to be a heated argument, the boy lowered the ramp and backed the tractor down to the start of the walking path.

My dad, the old man, and Mr. Pinos walked over to the tractor.

“Jezis Marja,
it's ancient!” my father groaned.

“It's old, yes, but it works just fine,” the old farmer reassured him again. “I've plowed many a field with this tractor, let me tell you.”

The farmer was obviously the boy's grandfather, and he reminded me of Mr. Doskar, my grandmother's fiancé. His hands trembled, too. It would have been many years since either he or the tractor had been anywhere near a field that needed plowing.

“The question is,” the old man wheezed, “how are you going to get the tractor into your yard?”

My father squared his shoulders to take the weight and responsibility of a tough decision, and pointed his chain saw in the direction of the trees.

“Okay, I'll cut the silver yew and you help me move it,” he told Mr. Pinos. Then he turned to the farmer. “When we're done, you can drive the tractor through the gate.”

A look of alarm appeared on the farmer's face.

“Drive it?” he said. “Oh, I couldn't. I'm too old. I couldn't possibly drive it through the forest.”

“Fine,” my dad shrugged impatiently. “Get your grandson to do it.”

“He doesn't have a license,” the old man said quickly. “He's not yet sixteen.”

“So?” my father asked. “He drove the tractor off the truck without any difficulty.”

“He wasn't supposed to,” the farmer told him. “He's really not allowed to drive. Are you?”

“Not really,” the boy admitted.

My father glared at the hapless collection of men standing around him.

“Get the tractor ready,” he snapped at Mr. Pinos. “And you come with me,” he told the boy.

Mr. Pinos opened his mouth to protest, but the look on my father's face made him close it. He climbed behind the wheel of the tractor and asked the farmer to explain the gears and levers, while the boy, Barry, and I followed my dad to the gate and watched him apply brute force and ignorance to my mother's silver yew. With a slow and terribly sad creaking of timber, my mother's birth tree fell into the forest without touching the gate, and our garden was suddenly a lot less attractive. My father trimmed the stump with his chain saw, and then he and the boy moved the fallen trunk so that Mr. Pinos and the tractor had a clear shot at the yard. The tree had been growing for over thirty years, and we had cut it down in less than thirty minutes.

“I'm very sorry, Mr. Woodpecker,” I said under my breath. “I hope you find another place to live in.”

I led Barry away from the gate as my dad cupped his hands and called out to Mr. Pinos. “Okay. Come on down,” he ordered. “Take it nice and slowly. You should be able to drive over the stump without too much trouble.”

We looked up at the path and listened to Mr. Pinos as he reluctantly revved the tractor's engine. He had been very nervous driving his own truck down this incline, but the tractor was ten times more frightening. It was bigger and heavier and Soviet-made, and, as Mr. Pinos quickly discovered, completely without brakes. A small detail the farmer had neglected to share.

I held Barry's collar and watched. Mr. Pinos started quite slowly but quickly gathered speed, and by the time he was halfway to the gate, the tractor was literally bouncing through the forest. It made a tremendous amount of noise, and as it crashed and rattled toward the house, I could see Mr. Pinos in the cab. His eyes were very wide and his mouth was open. He held the wheel at arm's length and screamed the whole way down the hill, and I leaped back in amazement as the tractor shot through the gate, jolted over the top of the tree stump, and hurtled toward the stone fence on the opposite side of the garden. It looked for all the world like Mr. Pinos would crash, but as he slewed across the mud pile, he did a remarkable thing. Somehow, he managed to activate the primitive digging arm, and as my dad, Barry, and I held our collective breath, he brought the arm over the top of the cabin and planted the spade in the mud directly in front of the front wheels. The tractor jerked violently. For an electrifying couple of seconds, it looked like it was going to somersault over the arm and keep going, but it didn't. The rear wheels flew up in the air and the entire machine stood on end, and then it slowly crashed back down to earth. We hurried over and found Mr. Pinos spread-eagled across the hood, his hands firmly grasping the steering wheel behind him. His mouth was still open and all the blood had drained from his face.

“That was incredible!” My father whistled. “Are you all right?”

“No brakes!” Mr. Pinos whispered. “The goddamn tractor didn't have any brakes!”

My dad had to pry his hands loose from the wheel and help him into Mr. Kozel's apartment. He told me to fetch some beer and pickles from the kitchen, and set about calming Mr. Pinos down.

I fetched two beers and a jar of pickles and then walked out into the yard, where I found the farmer and his grandson checking the tractor for damage. Once they had satisfied themselves that the digging arm still worked, they disappeared through the side gate and hastily climbed the hill to their truck, and I heard them start it a few minutes later, around the same time Mr. Pinos staggered out into the yard. Despite his remarks about seeing a job through to the end, it was obvious that his covert mission was over. Whatever the STB was paying him, it wasn't enough to compensate him for the life-threatening experience of working with my dad. He collected his tools and we helped him load his ladder into his truck, and he looked truly miserable as he drove off down the street. I could tell that he bitterly regretted the day he had knocked on our door.

I looked at my dad, who had a wistful smile on his face.

“Those three men just might have saved our house,” he said thoughtfully. “I think the worst might be over.”

There was a distant squeal of brakes from the bottom of the valley, and the smile disappeared from my father's face. My mother's train had just pulled into the station.

“Mum is going to be very upset that you cut down her tree,” I said.

“You're right,” my dad agreed. “The worst isn't over by any stretch of the imagination.”

He grabbed Mr. Glatz's chain saw and tidied up the tree stump. Then we nervously awaited my mother's arrival. I had never seen my mother really angry before, but I somehow knew that it would be terrible. My father seemed to understand this as well. We stood beside the fallen tree like criminals, and Barry came over and sat down beside us. With his sad, bloodshot eyes, he looked even more guilty than my dad.

“We're going to get in a lot of trouble,” I told him.

The words had scarcely left my mouth when a high-pitched howl floated down from the balcony. We looked up to see my mother disappearing into the living room. A few moments later, she burst out into the yard, her anguished cries increasing in pitch and volume. She ran furiously through the mud toward us, wobbling unsteadily in her high heels.

“How could you?” she shrieked. She raced over to my father and started to beat her fists against his chest. “You promised me you wouldn't touch it! You promised!”

“Janitchka,” my dad said, using the diminutive of my mother's name. “I feel terrible about cutting down the tree, believe me, but I had to do it to save the garden. I'll take the wood to a sawmill and make you a nice bed out of the timber, okay?”

“Don't you ‘Janitchka' me!” my mother roared. “A bed? You can take the wood and make me a coffin! Do you hear me? A coffin!”

She continued to scream and hit my father's chest, and then she whirled around and stalked back to the house. To my great surprise, my dad didn't follow her. He just sat down on the tree stump and lit himself a cigarette. I wasn't sure what to do, so I ran inside and found my mother throwing clothes into a suitcase. Her lips were tightly compressed and her face was very white, and there was a look in her eyes that I hadn't seen before. She packed her suitcase, and then she sat on the piano stool and cried for a very long time. I tiptoed over and put my arms around her knees.

“Please don't be angry, Mummy.”

My mother didn't answer. When she had finished crying, she stood up and carried her suitcase to the door. If she had had somewhere to go, I'm pretty sure she would have left. But the sad truth was that she had no family or friends to turn to. She had made her bed and had no choice but to lie in it with her husband and children. While the adversity of being a dissident was often unbearable, it kept my parents together in many situations where they might have otherwise divorced. My mother stood at the door for a while with the suitcase in her hand, and then she looked at me and sighed.