The Twelve Little Cakes (3 page)

 

 

THREE DAYS AFTER MY BIRTH, my father collected my mother and me from the Podoli Hospital and drove us home to our village on the outskirts of Prague. We crossed the Vltava River and followed it south-west until the baroque skyline was replaced by smoking chimneys and Communist tower blocks. After a while, the Vltava turned into the smaller Berounka River, which snaked its way into a lush valley where the small township of Cernosice nestled into the hillside. This would be my home for the next eighteen years.

Our house was at the very top of the hill. It was a charming, Art Deco villa that had once belonged to my mother's grandparents but was now subdivided into collective housing so that three families could live there. My parents and sister occupied the first floor, and a friendly old bachelor lived in the basement, but the other family that shared the house was far from friendly. They were the Nedbals, and they were professional informers. Mr. Nedbal had been a policeman in the fifties, and, after his retirement, he and his wife secured themselves a very nice place to live by volunteering to keep my dad under surveillance. My father's previous quiet but important work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been such that the old-guard Communists never forgot him, even after the revolution. It would be many years before I would learn why, but the first half of my life was spent watching invisible forces work actively against him. The old Communist dragon was forever sniffing around outside our front door, but it never ate us for dinner. What didn't kill us made us stronger, and I remember my childhood with a lot of fondness and joy.

One of my earliest memories is of the family sitting around the TV on the day before Christmas when I was three, watching our dog, Barry, star in a famous Czech film. Barry was an enormous Saint Bernard with a comically sad face. He had saved my parents in the hard years following the Prague Spring by being a natural in front of the camera. While my dad was struggling to find and keep a job, Barry appeared in five of the biggest films of the early seventies. He was a good-natured beast who towered above me as I took my first steps, and my father made a little sled for me to sit in so that Barry could pull me through the streets when they were covered with snow. We never failed to draw huge crowds, as Barry was without question the most popular dog in Czechoslovakia. He was even more popular than Laika, the dog the Soviet Union launched into space in the fifties. Whereas Laika was an alert, if somewhat panic-stricken animal, Barry was the perfect model of laziness. He was quite sneaky and would do anything to get out of work, and was the antithesis of all things the Soviet propaganda stood for.

In those early years, Barry was my favorite member of the family. From the moment I learned to walk and talk, I was forever running through the house in search of someone to play with. While my enthusiasm may have warmed my parents' hearts, it also created a lot of problems. My family knew that the Nedbals were listening through the walls, so they had developed a habit of talking at low volumes whenever they were inside the house. My sister, Klara, was particularly good at this, but I was the opposite. My voice was bright and strong, and I used it so much, my mother dubbed me her “little trumpet.” Whenever she and my dad were trying to be discreet, I could be counted upon to repeat whatever they were saying at the top of my lungs, so every time my parents had something important to discuss, they would send me outside to play with the dog.

“Why don't you go outside and play, little one?” my mother suggested that December afternoon. “Put on your red jacket and take Barry with you. Klara and I have to get a few things ready for Christmas.”

“Barry's a good boy!” I exclaimed. “Come outside, Barry!”

“I was thinking of taking Dominika with me when I picked up the carp,” my father growled. “Would you like to come for a drive?” he asked me. “We'll only be a few minutes.”

“Yes, please!” I said excitedly.

My father was a short but handsome man with prematurely gray hair and hazel eyes that sometimes turned yellow. With his gray hair and yellow eyes, he looked like a wolf. He had a strong voice, like me, except it was deep and raspy from smoking lots of cigarettes, and whenever he talked, it sounded like he was growling. From the moment he woke until the minute he went to bed, my dad was constantly in motion. He ate on his feet and worked very hard to keep the dragon from our door, and as the years passed and time finally caught up with him, he would lose his angular, wolflike physique and end up looking like a big gray bear. Only his deep, growling voice and big heart remained the same. Despite the constant disappointments and frustrations, he carried us through the hard times with an almost impossible sense of optimism, and was constantly dreaming up crazy schemes to keep us going until the Soviet regime was finally deposed.

“Where are we going, Dad? Are we going to the shops?”

“We're going to buy a fish,” my father said. “You'll need your jacket and boots.”

I followed him into the living room, which was where my sister and I slept, and he helped me put on my jacket, boots, and gloves. Then we walked upstairs to the garage. The hill we lived on was very steep, so our villa was on three levels. The garage was right at the top, and then you walked down a garden path to the main floor, where my family lived in two rooms next to a third room that was permanently locked. The Nedbals lived on the second floor, with the bathroom, and Mr. Kozel lived in the basement next door to the kitchen. As a toddler, I spent a lot of time running up and down the stairs, and quickly learned where the friendly parts of the house were. Going to the bathroom was never much fun, whereas the kitchen was a safe zone, the one place in the house where we could speak freely. Mr. Kozel was both slightly deaf and disinclined to gossip, so we spent most of our time in the kitchen, which was constantly filled with the most wonderful smells. My mother was an excellent cook, and the stove and boiler kept the room nice and warm in winter.

Up in the garage, my father opened the big wooden doors that led out onto the street, while I scrambled inside the car and wedged myself into the space behind the gearbox. The roads in our village were terrible, even though we lived in one of the nicer areas in Greater Prague, and my dad often complained that it would be easier to drive on the moon than across the potholed streets of Cernosice. But the bad roads made the trip down the hill very exciting. I would wrap my arms around the rubber gearbox mounting, while my father eased the car out of the garage, and then we would rumble down to the foot of the hill where there was a little row of shops and a beauty salon. Shopping with my dad was always an adventure. His pockets would be full of crumpled taxi-driving money, and he would often manage to talk the local shopkeepers into producing hidden goods from behind their counters. Unlike my mother, who was scrupulously honest and would turn a crown twice in her hand before spending it, my dad was more of a wheeler-dealer, and he would use me shamelessly to warm the hearts of the women who worked in the bakery.

On this occasion we parked in front of the grocery store and walked around the corner to the Hotel Slanka. In front of the pub, three men in plastic aprons stood behind two large tubs the size of miniature wading pools. Water sloshed from each tub, and behind the men stood a low bench that was covered with blood. My father picked me up and carried me over to the tubs.

“See the fish?”

Both tubs were full of big, gray carp. They swam slowly in circles, lazily opening and closing their mouths.

“Which one would you like?” my father asked me.

“The big one!”

“They're all big,” my father said. “Which big one do you mean?”

“That one!” I cried, pointing to a silvery carp with long whiskers.

One of the men took a net and scooped the fish out onto a scale.

“Three kilos twenty,” he said. “How do you want it?”

“We'll take it as it is,” my father told him.

He put me on the ground and gave the man twenty crowns. Then he pulled a canvas bag out of his pocket and held it open while the man deposited the carp inside it. It was a huge fish with bulging eyes, and I liked it immediately.

We put it in the trunk and drove back up the hill.

“Hello, Mum!” I called out as we unlocked the front door. “Come quickly! We have a fish!”

My mother and sister came running, and we followed my dad upstairs to the bathroom. He filled the bath and dropped the gasping fish into the tub. The water quickly revived the carp and it started to swim around the bath like a torpedo, slapping the surface of the water with its tail.

“What's his name?” I asked.

“It doesn't have a name,” my mother explained. “It's a special carp for Christmas.”

I stood on the tips of my toes and peered over the rim of the bathtub.

“Hello, Mr. Carp!” I said, making my father and sister laugh. “Don't be afraid, we'll take good care of you!”

“Come on everyone, lunch is ready,” my mother smiled.

She took me by the hand. “You can help me if you like,” she said, running her fingers through my hair, and I followed her down three flights of stairs to the kitchen. I watched as she sliced some bread and put it in a basket, and then I carried the basket to the kitchen table, where we ate all our meals.

 

 

MY MOTHER WAS SLIM and pretty and mysterious, with the eyes (and smile) of the Mona Lisa. She had her dreams and premonitions but was also extremely well read. My father viewed life as a day-to-day struggle, but my mother saw things from a greater perspective. She was the granddaughter of a founding member of the prewar Communist Party, and after the Communists took control of the country, she had watched her parents misuse the power they inherited. My mother's parents were members of the Communist elite that had invited the Russians to invade Czechoslovakia. They were fabulously wealthy, but as a little girl my mother couldn't help noticing that the families of her friends were very frightened of her mother. At a time when women took great care to dress and act as plainly as possible, my grandmother was widely known as the “Red Countess.” Back in the fifties and sixties, rich party members really did behave like the kings and queens of Prague. My mother, who had read all the Communist texts as a child, was appalled by the way her parents and their friends not only manipulated the system for their personal gain but also destroyed anyone who spoke up against them. In the end, she rebelled by marrying my father, a factory worker's son from the mining town of Ostrava. In one of those great ironies of life, my mother's parents, who had built their fortune in the name of the working class, hated my father on sight. The common man was great in theory, but under no circumstances was their daughter going to marry one, so, in 1968, my mother found herself on the opposite side of the political fence from her parents, and two years after the Russian invasion they officially disowned her. She and my dad were expelled from the party and ended up sharing a house with a family of informers.

While my father was outraged by the old guard's betrayal, my mother was heartbroken, having watched her parents evolve into the kind of people who would want to stop their country from becoming independent. My mother's parents had everything except moral integrity, and the more they profited under the Communist regime, the more cynical and bitter they became. As a result, my mother had resolved at an early age to try and be as morally upright as possible. It wasn't easy. Soviet-style communism demanded a lot of moral latitude, and my father was particularly good at finding loopholes in the system. If they hadn't married each other, it's possible that my dad might have succumbed to political temptation or my mother might have been crushed by the State. But together they had a rare combination: incorruptibility and a willingness to fight. My parents had many opportunities to sacrifice their ideals, but they never did. And while life may have been a lot harder than it needed to be, it was the life they had chosen, and they had few regrets.

WE HAD A LOVELY pre-Christmas lunch, and then my dad and Klara took Barry for a walk in the forest while my mother led me upstairs for my afternoon nap.

“But I'm not sleepy!” I protested as she tucked me up in bed.

“You're never sleepy,” she smiled. “But if you close your eyes, I'll read you a story.”

“A story! Will you read me
The Grandmother
?”

“Certainly,” my mother agreed. “If you get it down from the shelf, I'll read you the first chapter.”

The Grandmother
was one of my favorite books. It was a memoir by a Czech writer called Bozena Nemcova, who had lived in the last century when our country was part of the Austrian empire. Ms. Nemcova's grandmother was a wise and loving woman, a constant source of inspiration to her family. She had a very simple outlook on life, which was that people should look after each other as much as possible, and whenever there was a problem, the grandmother always managed to solve it in a positive way.

I liked Ms. Nemcova's grandmother very much. I had never met my real grandparents, so I thought that the grandmother in the book was a magical character, like the Fairy Godmother from
Cinderella.
When my mother read, I would close my eyes and imagine that the grandmother was sitting next to my bed, smiling at me as I drifted off to sleep.

When I awoke from my nap, my mother and the grandmother were gone. The living room was dark, and the trees outside were whispering in the wind. I climbed down from my bed and tiptoed over to the door. I had recently discovered that if I stood on the very tips of my toes, I could reach the handle and open the door by myself. I was very proud. I didn't have to call my mother to let me out, and I could surprise her by appearing in the kitchen unexpectedly.