The Twelve Little Cakes (25 page)

“Not a word to Mum and Dad,” she reminded me sternly.

“Okay,” I promised. “I won't say a word.”

Klara gave me a
haslerka
and slipped one in her mouth, then she zipped the candy and her cigarettes inside one of her old winter boots. “All right, let's get this over with.”

We went down to the kitchen and found my dad smoking and listening to Radio Free Europe, while my mother stood beside the oven and looked tired and unimpressed.

“It's not my fault!” Klara blurted before my mother could get a word in. “Dominika had to pat every single animal. It took me ages to get her out of there!”

“It's true,” I told her. “Mrs. Backyard has lots and lots of dogs. And guess what? One of them peed on Klara's socks!”

“Again?” my mother said. “That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.”

She reheated our dinner, and as we ate she emptied the pail into the big enamel pot, stirring the milk until it pasteurized and then skimming the cream from the top. After the news broadcast had finished, my dad threw on his jacket and drove off to Prague. Klara ladled the milk into glass bottles, and my mother took me upstairs.

“So,” she said casually as she ran the bath and helped me take off my clothes. “You and Klara went straight to the farm. You didn't stop anywhere else along the way?”

“No, Mum,” I said nervously. “We went straight there.”

My mother lowered me into the water and poured some shampoo onto my head. “Your hair smells funny,” she observed. “It smells like you've been sitting in a pub.”

“No!” I cried. “We didn't go anywhere near the Hotel Kazin! We didn't!”

“The Hotel Kazin,” my mother frowned. “I see.”

 

 

WHEN WE FETCHED THE MILK the following Tuesday and Thursday, Klara and I were very careful to be home in time for dinner. I was worried that I might have accidentally snitched, but as the week passed, it looked like my mother and father really didn't suspect anything. We worked in the yard on Saturday as usual, and when it was time to get the milk, I ran to the bathroom and washed my face and brushed my hair. Klara framed her eyes with black eyeliner and checked herself approvingly in the mirror, and then we grabbed the pail and disappeared into the forest, taking the secret trail down the hill to the Hotel Kazin.

“Ciao, bambina!”
the boys called out as we appeared in the parking lot.

“Hello,
volé
!” I exclaimed. “Is Martin here today?”

“No, he had to stay at home,” Klara's friend with the bike said regretfully. “But maybe you can dance with one of the girls. Hey, Martina! You want to look after Klara's little sister?”

“Sure, why not?” the leader of the gum-chewing girls shrugged. “We'll take good care of her, won't we, Sarka?”

“You bet,” one of her friends laughed.

The two girls slouched over and made a show of examining my cheap skirt and cheap sandals.

“You Furmans really know how to dress,” they observed.

“What you need is some makeup,” Martina suggested. “Come with us and we'll have you looking terrific in time for your afternoon performance.”

“That sounds good!” I said excitedly.

I followed them to the ladies' bathroom where they sat me up on the sink and went to work with the lipstick and eyeliner. Then they rubbed several handfuls of styling gel into my hair, teasing it so that it stood on end like I had jammed my fingers into an electric socket.

“What do you think?” they smirked.

“I like it!”

We emerged from the bathroom to a round of ironic applause from the boys, and Martina and Sarka led me to the dance floor. The mirrored ball rotated lazily above us as we danced to the Communist rock on the jukebox, the girls shaking their bottoms and wiggling provocatively. I noticed that their haughty smiles were gradually replaced by genuine ones. The room filled up with cigarette smoke, and more and more couples ventured out onto the dance floor until everyone, including my sister, was dancing. Song after song thundered out of the jukebox, and right at the point where I was sure that this was the happiest moment in my life, the door of the ballroom flew open and my mother and father walked in.

Everyone immediately froze.

“Klara! Dominika! What kind of masquerade is this?” my dad growled.

Within seconds, the dance floor was empty. My sister and I were the only people left standing.

“Get your things,” my father ordered.

My sister collected her handbag while her friends stared intensely at their shoes. A few of the boys who had worked in our yard muttered, “
Dobry den,
Mr. Furman,” but my dad ignored them and took Klara by the elbow and led her from the room. We drove home in silence, and Klara and I were sent down to the kitchen, which was where the family conferences took place. Except for the time I had run away from home, my parents had never been angry at me directly, but I had seen my father yell at Klara, and it was a terrible thing to behold. We were both on the verge of tears as we stood in the kitchen and waited for the ordeal to start. My dad wasted no time in laying down the law.

“If you have time to sneak away from your duties at home, you have time for a proper job,” he told my sister. “We understand that you want to be independent, but independence has to be paid for. From now on, during the summer holidays and every weekend, you'll be working at my mother's buffet at the Florenc bus station.”

The blood drained from Klara's face.

“Hilda's buffet?” she said incredulously.

“Your grandmother has kindly offered to employ you,” my mother said. “Dominika will take over your milk run and you can start earning your pocket money like everyone else.”

“But I don't want to work at Hilda's buffet,” Klara spluttered.

“Well that's the price you pay for being dishonest and setting a bad example for your sister,” my mother snapped. “Maybe in the future you'll think twice about lying to your parents.”

Klara burst into tears and ran upstairs in an absolute rage, and when she came into our bedroom that evening, she wordlessly threw herself on top of me and read a book for half an hour. I struggled beneath her and tried to explain that I hadn't meant to snitch, but she not only ignored me for the rest of the week, she continued to ignore me for the rest of the year. As the seasons merged and we adjusted to our new routines, Klara made a ritual of punishing me every day she had to work at the buffet by smothering me while she read her book the same evening. After a while, I learned to stop fighting and conserved my breath instead.

Sending my sister to work with my grandmother actually turned out to be a huge mistake, but it would be many years before my parents understood this. Once Klara and Hilda got past their personal differences, my sister not only received a crash course in under-the-table capitalism, she also picked up a few of my grandmother's more cynical personal philosophies and found them more to her liking than the strict moral code my mother preached at home. Hilda was a wheeler-dealer like my dad, but she had spent her young adulthood raising a family in poverty, and her view was that she had wasted a golden opportunity by failing to exploit her sexuality when she had it. Like Klara, my grandmother had been stunning as a girl, and after she had married (and been unhappy with) my granddad, she had seen many less attractive women marry for money instead of love and profit greatly as a result. Hilda thought that women like my mother were naive, and had never gotten over my mother's walking away from such great wealth to marry her son. My mother and Hilda were polar opposites, but in Klara, my grandmother found a willing protegée. So, by the time the leaves had fallen, Klara had completely replaced her old wardrobe with a new one, bought with the money she was earning, and these new clothes were a constant source of conflict between her and my mother. She had enough money to buy her own drinks now, too, so she went to the Hotel Kazin whenever she felt like it. The unexpected result of my father's attempt to discipline her through work was that she acquired the means to do whatever she wanted. With Hilda's encouragement, she became fiercely independent.

As the arguments between Klara and my parents grew louder, I quietly gained some independence of my own. My dad bought me two little milk pails to carry over across the hill to Mrs. Backyard's farm. The distance couldn't have been more than five hundred meters, but it was as though I had discovered a whole new world outside my doorstep. Apart from the farm, which was a wonderful source of entertainment, I was quickly introduced to the local children, and it turned out that Mary Hairy and Petr Acorn were just the tip of the iceberg: Cernosice was crawling with baby-boom kids like me.

Since I was a friendly and confident little girl, my natural instinct was to say hello to everyone, and it was only a matter of time before I knew the names of all the local boys and girls. As I carried my milk pails back and forth from the farm, I would always try to visit one of them. I would knock on their doors and ask their parents if they could come out and play, and while the children themselves were quite happy to see me, I began to realize that their parents were not.

“Ah, you're Furman's little girl,” they would say. “Aren't you a bit young to be knocking on our door?”

“I don't think so,” I would reply. “Is Petra home? Can she come out and play?”

“Petra's busy,” they would tell me. “You should probably go home.”

The parents who discouraged their children from playing with me were the same parents who had discouraged their older children from playing with Klara when she was my age (and whose sons were presently falling over themselves to buy her drinks at the Rotten pub). But whereas Klara had become shy and withdrawn as a result, the disapproval only made me more determined. If Petra couldn't play today, could she play tomorrow? I was forever asking, and as the Christmas season approached, more and more parents became wearily resigned to the sight of me playing in their yards with their children.

Despite the initial resistance of their parents, I became quite good friends with Petr and Mary. The Acorn and Hairy families were next-door neighbors who lived two houses down the street from mine. Their villas had been converted into communal housing, but like most people in the region, they lived with their relatives instead of complete strangers. The Hairy house was occupied by the Hairys and the Caesars, Mr. Caesar being Mr. Hairy's brother-in-law.

Everyone in the street was afraid of Mr. Caesar. He was extremely fastidious when it came to noise and litter. He was one of the few neighbors who kept his house and garden in immaculate condition, but his fussiness also extended to the forest, where he could often be found dismantling local treehouses and forts on the grounds that they were unsafe. Barking dogs enraged him, and excessive snowball-throwing or shouting in the street would also drive him nuts. It was a well-known fact that if you made a lot of noise outside the Hairys' villa on the weekends, Mr. Caesar would come out and chase you away. As far as the older kids in the neighborhood were concerned, playing cat and mouse with Mr. Caesar was even more fun than re-creating famous battles in the forest, but this was one game I would never join in. Deep down, I liked the way Mr. Ceasar kept his garden neat and tidy, and I longed for the day when our own house would be finished, because I secretly hoped it would look as nice as his.

MY SISTER AND MY PARENTS declared a truce over Christmas, and Klara made the festive season the best one I had experienced so far by contributing a lot of food to my mother's pantry and promising to stop lying on top of me when she came home from work. The Baby Jesus brought me a set of wax pencils and a Russian recording of
Swan Lake,
and we saw in the New Year by singing around the piano like old times and remembering Barry by watching him on TV.

It was a perfect start to an important year in my life. I would be attending school for the first time that summer, but I was also old enough to audition for the National Ballet Preparatory School, and this audition had been on my mind ever since the day I had met Mr. Slavicky. After the Christmas show, Mrs. Sprislova had taken my mother aside and explained that while I was one of the most expressive dancers she had ever trained, my size was going to be a problem at the audition. And now that the February date was approaching, she seemed even more nervous than my mother and I.

On the morning of the audition, my mother crisply ironed my best dress and put my hair up in pigtails. I was too nervous to eat, so I had a glass of milk for breakfast and checked my backpack several times for my leotard, legwarmers, and
piskoty
slippers. Then we stood outside the house and waited for my dad to return home from work. Just after sunrise, he rattled up our street, performed his famous three-point turn, and drove my mother and me back to Prague.

“Good luck,” he winked as we hopped out of the car.

I followed my mother through the big revolving door at the rear of the Federal Parliament building, and we walked into a crowded lobby. There must have been at least five hundred little girls applying for the preparatory school, and all of them seemed to be wearing dresses that you could only buy in Tuzex, an exclusive chain of shops that sold Western-brand products to the party elite or people who could get their hands on U.S. dollars or deutsche marks. The mothers wore fur coats and seemed even more glamorous than the well-to-do women whose daughters attended Mrs. Sprislova's school. Everyone checked out my mother's outfit and hat, before looking down at me and smiling with relief. I was easily the smallest girl, and I could tell that none of the women considered me a threat. I clutched my backpack and waited nervously in the crowd until Mrs. Saturday appeared at the head of the stairs.