The Twelve Little Cakes (2 page)

She told my father about the girl on the swing, and he eventually agreed that they would have another child. My sister, Klara, was nine at the time, and excited to learn that she would have a baby sister. Neither she nor my dad were the slightest bit fazed by my mother's decision to give birth as the result of a dream. My mother's dreams had a habit of coming true. She came from a long line of people who had premonitions, and the way she remembers it, the little girl was not only demanding to be born but also insisting that my parents snap out of their depression and come to terms with what had happened to their country. Life under communism was difficult but not impossible. The system was unfair but the human spirit triumphed on a daily basis, and if there was one thing my parents knew for certain in a time of great social and political upheaval, it was this: they loved each other with all their hearts. It was spring in the garden of my mother's dreams, and the girl's laughter took her back to the days when she and my father were unafraid. Their love was still strong, so maybe the dream was telling them that the time had come to try and live without fear. In 1974, my mother went off the Pill and tried to become pregnant. And the moment she decided to do this, the little girl vanished from her dreams.

“She was a messenger,” my mother tells me now. “But it was definitely you. Everything was the same, especially your voice. I had to wait all those years for you to start talking, but when you did, your voice was exactly the same as I remembered it.”

The little girl's disappearance upset my mother very much. It was as though a light had snapped off at the end of a tunnel, and her faith was tested every month as her early attempts to get pregnant were unsuccessful. She and my dad kept an eye on the calendar, changed their diets, and made love regularly, but nothing happened. They consulted the top specialists in Prague, but it was only when she sat down with an old and wise factory worker that the answer presented itself. The factory worker had been a respected gynecologist in the forties. He had lived through the German and Russian invasions and had been reeducated by the Communists in the time of Stalin. He had seen a lot of terrible things in his life but maintained a strong belief in the basic goodness of people, and when my mother told him about the little girl in her dreams, he took her hand and smiled.

“You want your child too badly, Jana,” he told her. “The best things in life usually come along when you least expect them. If you really want to become pregnant, my advice would be to stop trying so hard and leave it in the hands of the little god.”

In Czech fairy tales, the little god is a benign but powerful character who turns up in times of conflict. He is depicted as a kindly old man who watches from a distance and smiles approvingly when a problem resolves itself, or sighs and shakes his head when it doesn't. Occasionally, he will turn people into bears (if they're wicked), but most of the time he seems content to let his subjects sort their problems out themselves. One of the nicest things about the little god is that he really does seem genuinely happy when things turn out for the best.

My mother considered the factory worker's advice and decided to leave my birth in the hands of the little god. From that moment on, she and my father made love for the joy of making it instead of out of desperation to conceive, and of course the moment they did, my mother became pregnant. Things were difficult as a result of my father's struggle to keep a job, and my parents really couldn't afford another child, but their faith was rewarded by a sudden upswing of circumstance. My father managed to get hold of a license to drive taxis, and because of the independent nature of the taxi companies at the time, it would be many years before the secret police could take this job away from him. He worked at night most of the time, ferrying customers across Prague in the hours when the secret police had clocked off. The great irony about his taxi-driving years was that he earned a lot more money than he ever would have as an engineer. My dad was not only an excellent driver, he was also very chatty and charming. He made a point of taking the most direct routes to his customers' destinations, and quickly built up a small but devoted clientele who not only trusted him but enjoyed listening to his stories. He told everyone he drove that he would soon be the father of a second child, which is how he met the obstetrician who delivered me.

Unless you were a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, you didn't get to choose which doctor or hospital you went to. Under the state health system, you had to go to the medical center that was closest to your place of residence. If the doctors there were ill-mannered or incompetent, there was nothing you could do about it. When my sister was born, my mother was sent to the Karlov Hospital, which was a cold and oppressive building in a desolate yard, with crows perching ominously in the trees outside her window. My mother was very unhappy giving birth there, and told my father that she would do anything to avoid delivering another baby in “The Crow Hospital.” Shortly afterward, as luck (or the little god) would have it, my dad struck up a conversation with a pretty young doctor who had just been transferred to the nicest hospital in Prague. The woman's name was Dr. Raclavska, and she was taken by my father's story about the little girl his wife had seen in her dreams. The young doctor also needed driving lessons, so my dad quickly cut a deal. He taught her in exchange for her accepting my mother in the delivery room when she was due. It was against all the hospital regulations, of course, but communism was full of people making private arrangements, which is how I came to be born in the exclusive Podoli Hospital on March 7, 1975, the same month Dr. Raclavska passed her driving test with flying colors.

The Podoli Hospital was a lovely, cream-colored building that stood beneath the Vysehrad Castle on the south bank of Prague's Vltava River. It overlooked a place where the swans traditionally nested in winter, and was so nice it was almost impossible to get into. Prague was full of places that ordinary citizens weren't allowed to visit, and one of the saddest things about the Soviet occupation was that it forced the formerly civilized Czech people to become very adept at cutting under-the-table deals.

From 1948 to 1989, the people who profited most under communism were those with the moral flexibility to say one thing and do another. With the exception of a very small percentage of overly idealistic or stupid people, everyone in Czechoslovakia saw communism for what it was: a deeply flawed and corrupt system in which a wealthy elite were able to oppress their fellow countrymen in the name of equality. This moral flexibility dates back to the Russian liberation of Prague in 1945. One of the first things the Red Army did was use Gestapo archives to identify all the Czechs who had secretly collaborated with the Nazis. Instead of punishing these people, the Russians coerced them into joining the secret police, which played a major role in the 1948 putsch, in which the Czechoslovakian government was overthrown by the Communist Party. A reign of terror ensued until the death of Stalin in 1953, by which time the status quo was firmly in place. Party officials paid lip service to Marxism and the myth of the worker while systematically stealing the assets of the state; the result being a small elite of the superrich overseeing a country with serious economic problems.

In the mid-sixties, when my father worked briefly for the government, there was a lot of disillusionment about Soviet-style communism. People accepted the ideology because they were afraid, but their fear didn't prevent them from seeing the wealth that was flaunted by the party elite. In the spirit of the times, many idealistic young people wanted to change the way their country was run, and this led to the emergence of a humanist faction within the party. This faction wanted to implement a progressive brand of socialism and, more important, sever the ties between the Czech and Russian governments. In 1968, much to its own amazement, the faction found itself controlling the majority of votes in the Czech parliament, and wasted no time in trying to dismantle the old Soviet infrastructure. Censorship laws were loosened, KGB agents were sent back to Moscow, and rich Communists from the Stalinist era suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of a progressive new movement that was called the Prague Spring.

The old guard's response was simple and treacherous. They accused the government of “counterrevolutionary activities” and sent a petition to the Soviet Union, inviting the Red Army to invade Czechoslovakia. Happy to oblige, the Russians rolled into Prague on August 21, 1968. The old guard was reinstated, and people like my dad found themselves shoveling coal or mixing concrete. The most dispiriting thing about the 1968 invasion was the ease with which the Russians brought our country to heel. We capitulated without a fight. With only one exception, every single member of the Prague Spring cabinet signed a “normalization agreement” that authorized the Soviet Union to take control of our affairs, and our brief flirtation with idealism was over. For the next twenty years, a particularly cynical regime of socialism would prevail, in which favor-trading and petty scamming were the order of the day, and young doctors in need of driving lessons would cheerfully agree to sneak a dissident's wife into a Communist hospital.

 

 

ON THE MORNING OF MY BIRTH, the usual contradictions of the system were in place. Despite its exclusivity, the Podoli Hospital was overcrowded with patients, and the doctors and nurses were drinking on the job. It was a Friday, a day before the International Day of Women, and the hospital staff were celebrating in advance. While Czechoslovakia was nowhere near as poor as Russia, we had quickly embraced the Communist calendar and work ethic, which consisted of many public holidays and lots of cheap booze. The International Day of Women was particularly notorious, as it provided men with an opportunity to get roaring drunk without the usual fear of reprisal from their wives, and my mother had spent the entire week before my birth trying to hurry her contractions along. Having a daughter on the International Day of Women may have sounded like a romantic notion, but it was dangerous as well. By the mid-afternoon, the entire hospital would be operating in an alcoholic haze. It was therefore with great relief that on the morning of March 7, with Dr. Raclavska in attendance, she managed to push me out while the hospital staff was still relatively sober.

“Is it a girl?” my mother panted.

“It's a girl,” Dr. Raclavska smiled. “You have a beautiful baby daughter.”

My mother let out a huge sigh of relief.

At that precise moment, the sun broke through the clouds and flooded the maternity ward with light, and the door to the delivery room flew open and a crowd of doctors and nurses rushed in.

“Hezky Mezinarodni Den Zen!”
they exclaimed, presenting Dr. Raclavska with a big bunch of flowers.

The nurses crowded around my mother and complimented her on such a healthy-looking child. Everyone was dressed in hospital white, and my mother says it was like we were surrounded by angels. Then the head nurse wrapped me up in a blanket, snapped an identification tag around my wrist, and whisked me away to the nursery before the party in the hospital became too wild. She placed me on a large communal trolley that was crowded with other loaf-sized bundles, and locked the door behind her.

My mother contacted my dad via the taxi dispatcher, and spent the rest of the morning waiting for him to arrive. Because she was an unofficial patient, Dr. Raclavska had not been able to secure her a bed. So while the young doctor had hurried off to see whether a bed was available in one of the other wards, my mother lay on a bench in the delivery room, listening to the clinking of glasses and popping of champagne corks in the distance.

Eventually, my father and sister appeared. They had been delayed at the front gate by a hospital guard who refused to let them in until they bribed him with a carton of cigarettes, and when they finally arrived at the maternity ward, no one knew anything about my mother or me. My dad had to search for Dr. Raclavska, who had become sidetracked in a distant wing of the hospital. But after he presented her with a bottle of cognac, she resumed her mission to find my mother a bed. While she did this, a nurse escorted my dad and sister to the maternity ward and wheeled me out into the lobby in an oversized pram. It was here that my father and sister saw me for the first time. My eyes were closed and I wriggled around in my blanket, clenching and unclenching my fists.

“Hello, Dominika,” my sister cooed, trying out the unusual name she had talked my parents into giving me.

The doctors and nurses congratulated my father, prompting someone to open yet another case of champagne. Then Dr. Raclavska appeared with the news that she had found my mother a bed, and brought my dad and sister into the delivery room.

My mother smiled wearily at their arrival, and looked very pretty in spite of her ugly hospital nightgown. My dad knelt beside her and smothered her with kisses while Dr. Raclavska cracked the bottle of cognac and poured herself a celebratory drink. She had been lucky to find a bed. The maternity ward was overcrowded, because Prague was full of women like my mother who had decided that the best way of coping with the Socialist state was to try and find happiness through their families. It was a protest, but an acceptance as well. Unlike the West Germans, who rebuilt their country in the postwar years by investing and believing in the concept of the nation, we learned to abandon our nation and concentrate on ourselves. We followed the teachings of Marx and Lenin every day, but the biggest irony of communism was that it taught the working class to look out for Number One. In the “normalization era” of the seventies and eighties, Czech families did whatever it took to survive, and the more we pretended to go along with the system, the less frightening the system became. By the mid-eighties, communism was like an old dragon that would occasionally crawl out from its cave and eat someone for dinner. As long as it wasn't you the dragon was eating, you could live with the sound of screams in the distance. Which was precisely what we did until the Velvet Revolution.