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.
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.
The Twelve Little Cakes Page 2