The Twelve Little Cakes (44 page)

I took my envelope and scampered away in delight. Out on the street, I looked up at the National Theater and wished again that my grandfather could see me dance. I peeked in my envelope and discovered there were four tickets inside. I pulled two out and put them in my pocket. I would tell my parents that I only had two tickets, and secretly send the other two to my grandparents. Even though
The Ant Ferda
was a children's ballet, maybe I could warm their hearts by inviting them to see me in the famous Golden Chapel.

That evening, my parents and my sister and I sat down to eat dinner. My mother served the “Spanish bird,” which was little rolls of meat stuffed with sausages and pickles.

“Mrs. Saturday wants to give me some more roles!” I announced. “Luisa Podarilova is going to the conservatory, which means they might let me dance the little girl in
The Nutcracker
the next time they put it on!”

“What do you mean?” my father asked. “We thought you would go to the State Conservatory as well.”

“I would like to,” I said. “But it's very hard to get in. Mrs. Saturday says they take twenty girls out of the five hundred who audition. Even if they don't take me, I can still make lots of money playing children's roles at the Smetana Theater.
The Nutcracker
pays fifty crowns a performance and I'm already getting thirty-five for
The Ant Ferda
!”

“Fifty crowns!” my mother whistled. “You'll soon be making more money than me!”

“Of course they'll take you at the conservatory!” my father growled. “You have more talent than the other girls put together. You can dance and act and sing. Like Barbra Streisand.”

My sister choked on her Spanish bird. Barbra Streisand was one of my father's recent obsessions. My dad loved nothing more than to speculate at length about my future as an actress. The Iron Curtain would fall and I would go to New York and perform in Broadway musicals. After which he would throw his Skoda on the trash pile and go out and buy himself a new Mercedes. Or a BMW. Or a Volvo. Or all three.

“Guess what?” I said, changing the subject. “I've invited someone very special to the premiere!”

“And who would that be?” my mother smiled.

“I'm not telling,” I said mysteriously. “It's a surprise!”

The morning of the premiere, there was a letter addressed to me in our mailbox. The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar, but when I opened it, I discovered that it was from my grandparents. I read the letter slowly and then took it down to the kitchen and showed it to my mother.

 

Two tickets to
The Ant Ferda
fell out of the envelope and fluttered to the floor. I had sent them to my grandfather five days earlier, along with a friendly letter it took me half a day to write.

“Oh, Trumpet,” my mother sighed. “I'm so sorry. You should have told me you were going to invite them.”

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” I said sadly.

I picked the tickets up from the floor and wondered what I should do with them. They were very valuable, and it would be a pity to throw them away.

I thought about this for a moment, and then I had a very good idea. I would invite Eugene and his mother to the show! They were from Moravia and didn't have party connections, and it was obvious that Mrs. German really loved the theater. A ticket to the Golden Chapel would be something they would appreciate much more than my grandparents, who were so used to the privileges of their Communist lifestyle that they didn't even go to half the things they were invited to.

“We could invite Eugene and Mrs. German!” I said. “Eugene is going to hold his thumbs for me, so maybe he can hold his thumbs and watch me at the same time.”

“That's a good idea,” my mother agreed. “Would you like me to call them?”

“Yes, please!” I said. “And afterward, maybe we can go to Slavia as a special treat. What do you think?”

Slavia was an expensive restaurant directly opposite the National Theater. Whenever the secret police were making my dad's life misery, he would take us to Slavia for dinner to show them that his spirit wasn't broken. He couldn't afford to do this, of course, but I didn't know that at the time. Those special dinners at Slavia are some of my fondest childhood memories.

“I don't know about that,” my mother smiled. “We'll have to ask your father.”

At a quarter to seven that evening, I stood in the wings of the Golden Chapel with the other junior dancers. This was it. I was finally going to perform in front of an audience. The theater was empty, but the orchestra had started to tune their instruments in the pit. Suddenly, Mrs. Saturday clapped her hands and told us to take our positions. She was wearing her very best apronlike dress, and pretended to kick our bottoms as we ran onto the stage.

“Ptui, ptui, ptui,” she whispered to each of us. “Let the devils take you!”

The doors swung open and I heard the audience rumble in. It was exciting, but terrifying as well. There's nothing quite like an opening night to set your nerves on edge. I took my position and waited for the conductor to tap the stand with his baton, and, as the curtain drew open, I swarmed around the anthill with the other eggs and ants. Mrs. Saturday had cast me as a naughty egg, so I got to disobey the ant who played our nurse. I hopped gleefully up and down and danced deliberately out of time, and by the end of the scene, I had annoyed the nurse so much that she pretended to spank my bottom before pulling me offstage.

During the intermission, I took the elevator up to the dressing room, exchanged my foam-rubber egg for a black leotard and a plastic helmet with antennae, and then went backstage and quietly waited for the final scene.

Like so many Czech plays produced during the Communist regime,
The Ant Ferda
was a children's tale festooned with political ideology. Ferda, a single-minded ant (who reminded me of my father), decides to leave the colony and set up shop on his own. He goes out into the world and has many adventures before ultimately realizing that he's better off in a collective. In the final act, he returns to the colony and all the ants rush out to greet him. The whole cast ran onstage and we formed a giant circle around Ferda, waving red handkerchiefs above our heads as we danced. The music swelled and the dancing became more triumphant, and then the conductor struck the air with his baton and everybody froze.

After a moment of silence, the theater shook with applause. The curtain closed and then opened again, and the cast took turns bowing. A ticket lady ran onstage with a basket of flowers for the lead ballerina, and a minute later, the junior chorus and I lined up to take our bows. I heard my father yelling, “Bravo!” and looked into the orchestra seats in time to see Mrs. German lifting Eugene up to the balustrade. She called my name, and Eugene threw a rose in my direction. I tried to catch it, and would have fallen into the orchestra pit, had someone not grabbed me from behind. The stem of the rose brushed the tips of my fingers and then fell down into the horn section. The junior chorus bowed once more and was hurried off backstage. The curtain closed for the final time and the applause died away.

I went up to the dressing room and changed out of my costume, and was walking back to the elevator when a man wearing a black tuxedo stopped me in the hallway. He was carrying a black trumpet case in one hand and a white rose in the other.

“Are you Dominika?” he asked me. “If you are, I've been told that this might belong to you.”

He offered me the rose and I accepted it eagerly.

“Thank you very much!” I exclaimed.

“Don't mention it,” the trumpet player laughed. “I'm just glad you're not the lead ballerina. Your flower landed on my head. I don't think I would have survived the whole basket.”

He smiled at his own joke, and we rode the elevator down to the lobby together. I clutched the rose and felt unbelievably happy. I had danced in my first ballet and received my first flower. I pressed the petals to my nose and took in the sweet fragrance, not minding its broken stem and battered appearance. It was mine and I had earned it, and I carried it delightedly out of the elevator and down into the lobby where my parents were waiting.

THE LITTLE TUBE

IN 1985, FOUR DAYS after I turned ten, Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. A feeling of liberation swept through Czechoslovakia. Even the monotone of the Voice of America's broadcaster, Karel Jezdinsky, started to crackle with hope. My father was beside himself. He was convinced that Cold War communism was finally coming to an end, and took to wearing the Solidarnosz pin Mr. Poloraich had given him as a joke. Whenever he was interviewed by the secret police, he pinned it to his lapel to let them know that the times were changing. Still, nothing much changed. After one particularly heated interrogation in which he told the STB that it would be they, not he, who would soon be unemployed, he was fired from his job and threatened with prison for vagrancy under article 203 of the criminal code.

“The bastards are becoming desperate!” he'd exclaim in the mornings. “I can hear the Politburo grinding their teeth!” He would rub his hands gleefully and wolf down his breakfast, and then he would throw on his jacket and drive away in search of work.

One day in early April, he came home very late with a sack of potatoes and a barrel of wine in his trunk. He had found a job at an agricultural cooperative in South Moravia, near the famous fields of Austerlitz where Napoleon had defeated Austria and Russia. The chief of the cooperative was a short, temperamental man called Comrade Maxian, who liked to think of himself as a modern-day Napoleon. He was a Communist with strong capitalist leanings, and cleverly used ideology to run his cooperative in the style of a land baron. Comrade Maxian recognized a fellow entrepreneur in my father and cheerfully overlooked his bad papers. He took my dad on a tour of his private wine cellar, where they quickly fell into a long discussion about Gorbachev and the changes he was likely to make in Eastern Europe. By sunset, my father had pitched Comrade Maxian two of Dr. Stein-Ein's inventions, along with the concept of turning ideas into patents and selling them in West Germany. The agricultural chief was very impressed. Uncorking the fourth bottle of wine for the evening, he authorized my father to develop ideas and build prototypes for the cooperative. Comrade Maxian would finance these inventions and provide political cover, while my father would assemble the necessary teams of scientists and technicians. They shook hands on what would become the first stage of their collaboration—a small chemical factory in our garage.

By the time Gorbachev had appeared on Russian television, my father, in the true spirit of perestroika, had turned our garage into a medium-sized laboratory. Bags of cement and boxes of tiles were hauled out and deposited into the backyard, where they slowly disappeared into a jungle of weeds, and the huge pile of sand that had been sitting in front of our driveway for two years was shoveled over the fence, only to be replaced by barrels of lye and epichloride.

A few days later, the first laboratory truck showed up in our street. Mr. Simek lingered over his lawn clippings as my father helped the driver unload his equipment. These deliveries became a weekly occurrence, and the Simeks, Acorns, Caesars, and Haseks watched with interest as boxes and barrels were carried into our garage. Soon afterward, strange vapors began to emanate from the house. The smell of ammonia was quite overpowering, confirming the neighbors' suspicions that whatever it was my father was up to, it must be illegal.

In our garage, a team of technicians was assembling the
aparatura,
which was Dr. Stein-Ein's latest invention. It was a high-tech chemical distillery, connected to a state-of-the-art computer the size of a wardrobe. The computer looked like something out of a fifties science fiction film, and was made by TESLA, the state-run electronics factory. The name TESLA was the subject of an old and bitter joke in the scientific community. It was said to stand for
TEchnicky SLAba,
which translates as “technically weak,” but Dr. Stein-Ein was very proud of his computer. “It may be slow, but it's unbreakable!” he would declare. My mother, Klara, and I watched nervously as he tried out his invention for the first time. My mother was very tense, and told me in a low voice that along with the lye and epichloride, some of the barrels in the garage contained highly toxic nerve gas and contact poisons.