The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I like it most when you read to me.”

  “I know,” my mother sighed.

  JUST BEFORE THE COURT APPEAL, my mother had come to an arrangement with her bosses at the Economic Institute: she was allowed to write her books at home as a small compensation for them taking credit for her work. My mother hated writing these books. There was a great deal of pressure to alter her statistics and make the Soviet economy look better than it was. But she refused to do this. Instead, she presented the statistics and her analysis in such a way that if you weren’t reading closely, you might think that the numbers were favorable, but upon careful inspection, you would see the statistics for what they really were. (In April 1985, an American journal called Soviet Studies quoted several of her books, referring to them as some of the most reliable sources of information about the Soviet economy on record.) Writing these books was very hard work, and whenever a deadline loomed, my mother would become too busy to look after me. Klara was at school, and the local kindergartens were overflowing with baby-boom children, so my parents started looking around for someone to babysit me. They eventually found an old Austrian woman who agreed to take care of me for not much money.

  The old woman’s name was Mrs. Habova, and I was very excited when she first appeared at our house, because she looked a little bit like Auntie Mary. She was tiny and wrinkled, with gray hair, thick glasses, and an even thicker accent, and she seemed as enthusiastic about having me in her life as I was about having her in mine. Her husband had recently died and her children had all grown up, so she was delighted to have a little girl to look after. The problem was, she was terribly strict. I had to call her Oma, which means “Granny” in German, and she would turn up at nine o’clock every morning and cook me a runny egg for breakfast. I didn’t like runny eggs and I didn’t like speaking German, but Oma Habova seemed determined to try and raise me the same way she had raised her own children, which was with an emphasis on discipline and timing. Every day was carefully planned, and every mouthful I ate and every breath I took seemed to be incorporated into Oma’s schedule.

  “Mein Zwergelchen, es is zu spät!” she would fret while I poked my egg with a spoon. “Los los, du musst schneller essen!” (“My little dwarf, it is too late. . . . Hurry up—you must eat faster.”)

  I would screw up my face and force myself to eat the egg, and then we would go outside for a walk. I loved going for walks, especially in the spring and especially when I could persuade Oma to take me into the forest. Our street ended in a cul-de-sac at the very edge of the forest, and there was a lovely walking track that Oma would sometimes take me down. The forest was completely untouched, so, along with the owls and badgers and pine martens, there were also deer and foxes. The smell of rotten oak leaves and pine sap was wonderful, and we could walk for about a kilometer before the track curved around the side of the mountain and there was a steep ravine on one side. Whenever we came to the ravine, Oma would take my hand and lead me back to the street.

  “But can’t we keep going?” I would protest. “I like it up here. I’ll be careful, Oma, I promise!”

  “I know you will, Zwergelchen,” she would say. “But we can’t go any farther because of the wolf.”

  “The wolf?” I would ask.

  “The wolf who lives in the ravine,” Oma would tell me. “He’s very hungry, and he likes nothing more than to eat little girls and boys who disobey their grandmothers.”

  “Is he the same wolf as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “Yes, I think he is,” Oma would agree.

  “Well, then he eats grandmothers, too,” I would point out.

  “Maybe he does.” Oma would smile. “In which case we had both better get out of here, nicht wahr?”

  By the time we arrived home, Oma would usually be so tired that all she wanted to do was sit in front of the TV and knit—her favorite activity. In the early weeks of our time together, she asked me if I would like to help, and when I said yes, she wound a ball of wool around my hands, handcuffing me to whatever scarf or sweater she was knitting. Then I had to sit on the floor and watch an incredibly boring arts-and-crafts show until it was time for my nap.

  “What are you going to read to me today?” I would ask. “Will you read me Prince Bajaja?”

  “That depends on whether you’ll be quiet,” Oma Habova would answer.

  “But I like talking,” I would cry. “And I like to know what’s going on.”

  “If you listen, you’ll find out,” Oma would say.

  “Yes, but I like it when you tell me!” I would insist.

  Before Oma came along, I always looked forward to my afternoon nap, because my mother would sit on the edge of my bed and read me stories until I fell asleep. She was very patient and would answer all my questions about the characters in the books, probably because she understood that the best way to put a talkative child to sleep is to let her talk until she’s tired herself out. Oma’s own children must have been very quiet, because she simply couldn’t fathom the idea of talking during nap time. And once she started to read, she would simply increase her volume to drown out my questions, mispronouncing the words in her thick Austrian accent.

  “Once upon a time, there was a handsome ponce,” she would say. “And one day, he rode out to look for a poncess . . .”

  After a few months of being babysat by Oma, I began to notice that there were a lot of old ladies in our street who were even more like The Grandmother than she was. Three of these ladies lived quite close to our house—Mrs. Liskova, Mrs. Noskova, and Mrs. Sokolova. They were very old and kind, and whenever Oma and I walked past their front gardens, they would wave and say hello. They seemed much more relaxed and friendly than Oma, and I secretly imagined they were the three fairy godmothers from Sleeping Beauty. Whenever it was sunny, the ladies could be found working in their gardens, and I would look forward to seeing them weeding their flower beds or sitting on their front steps with peaceful smiles on their faces.

  “Hello, Mrs. Liskova!” I would call out as we made our way down the street. “How are you today?”

  Mrs. Liskova was a tall and bony woman in her eighties, who lived in a villa near the bend in the road.

  “Very well, thank you!” she would reply, shading her eyes with her hand. “I’m just sitting here with my roses, having a bit of a think.”

  “What are you thinking about?” I would ask.

  “Don’t be rude,” Oma Habova would whisper. “It’s none of your business what she’s thinking.”

  “I was just remembering the good old days before the war,” Mrs. Liskova would sigh. “There are so many stories I could tell, but nobody has the time to listen these days.”

  “I do!” I would exclaim. “I’d love to listen to your stories!”

  “Another day perhaps!” Oma would call out, nudging me with her stick. “We have to be home in time for lunch!”

  “No hurry,” Mrs. Liskova would laugh. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The house next to Mrs. Liskova’s had a bright green coal shuttle in the garden. It was the home of Mrs. Noskova, a tiny, birdlike lady who walked on crutches but always seemed to be in a good mood.

  “Hello, Mrs. Noskova.” I would wave. “We’re going for a walk.”

  “I wish I could come with you,” she would smile.

  “How’s your dog?” I would ask. “Is Corina feeling better?”

  “She’s just old,” Mrs. Noskova would reply. “There’s no cure for old age, I’m afraid.”

  Oma would shiver at the thought and bustle me down the road to the next lady’s villa, which was a gray cube with a small balcony on the first floor. This was Mrs. Sokolova’s house. She was the nicest of the three, and she would sometimes even wait for me in her garden. My mother told me that Mrs. Sokolova had lived a very difficult life. Her husband had been the director of a bank but had committed suicide after the 1948 putsch, because he knew that the secret police were coming for him and that by killi
ng himself he would spare his wife and children from persecution. Like so many women whose husbands had been killed or imprisoned by the Communists, Mrs. Sokolova had to support her family by working a physically demanding job in her later years. Twenty years as a railway porter had destroyed the circulation in her legs, but she wasn’t angry or bitter about her life. She would wait for me near her front gate whenever it was sunny, and would sometimes give me biscuits she had baked for me herself.

  “Hello, Mrs. Sokolova!” I would cry, shaking Oma loose and running through the gate.

  “Careful, you’ll knock me off my feet!” Mrs. Sokolova would laugh. “I made these biscuits from an old recipe my mother taught me when I was your age.”

  She would pull a paper bag filled with biscuits out of her apron and press it into my hand.

  “Say thank you to Mrs. Sokolova,” Oma would prompt.

  “Thank you very much. The last ones were delicious!”

  “You’re very welcome.” Mrs. Sokolova would smile.

  Oma and I would continue down the road, and after I had eaten a couple of biscuits, she would confiscate the rest of the packet, telling me that they would ruin my appetite for lunch.

  “But I’m hungry!” I would protest. “All I’ve had to eat is a runny egg.”

  “Hunger is the best cook in the world,” Oma would say wisely. “Wenn du nichts zu essen hast, alles schmeckt gut!” (“When you have nothing to eat, everything tastes good.”)

  “Yes, Oma,” I would sigh. “Jawohl.”

  AS THE MIDSUMMER WEEKEND APPROACHED, I found myself looking forward to having my mother take care of me instead of Oma, and I was disappointed to discover that my dad had hired a crew of tradesmen to work melouch on our house instead. Working melouch, or “on the side,” was the Czech equivalent of moonlighting, except the moonlighting took place in broad daylight when the people concerned were supposed to be at work. The practice of taking off from work (for weeks at a time) and earning cash on the side was so commonplace, a sophisticated system of bribes had evolved where workers would routinely cover for each other in exchange for reciprocal favors further down the line. The problem, of course, was that this was illegal, so the people doing the work were able to hold their employers to ransom. My father not only had to pay his crew handsomely to repair our house, he also had to indulge their whims, which invariably consisted of a never-ending supply of beer until they were too drunk to keep working, usually by mid-afternoon.

  As a result, the early part of our summer consisted of my mother cooking sausages in the kitchen all day, while my sister ran up and down the hill to the Under the Forest pub, ferrying beer to the workers as they stood around and watched my dad demolish the Nedbals’ apartment. The men would arrive early and make an impressive show of rattling their tools. It was like an army of termites was eating its way through our house. Under my father’s supervision, the workers knocked down the Nedbals’ walls and ceiling and then moved up to the roof, cutting the rafters with their chain saws and throwing the terra-cotta tiles onto the ground, making a tremendous racket and filling the house with clouds of red dust.

  It was obviously not a safe environment for a little girl, so my parents asked Oma if she would mind taking care of me at her apartment. Two months of babysitting had taken its toll on both of us, but she graciously agreed. Every morning she would collect me at eight and we would walk to the opposite side of the hill, where she lived in the basement of a small art deco villa. We would climb down a steep flight of steps from the road to her garden, and Oma would unlock her front door with one of the many keys she carried on a big safety pin. Her apartment was dark and cold, and the plaster on the ceiling kept peeling off and falling onto the carpet. She also lived right next to the cellar, so everything smelled like old potatoes and coal. We weren’t allowed to sit in the garden, because it was her landlord’s private property, so Oma would switch on an electric heater and position me in front of the TV. Her television set was broken, so she would spend a lot of time fiddling with the aerial and sticking it out of the window to catch what little signal there was, but the screen was always grainy and it was always the same boring arts-and-crafts shows. Every day, I would carry my big book of fairy tales to her apartment, but the basement was so quiet and grim it made the scary parts of the stories even more scary than usual, and I was always too frightened to ask her to read to me.

  After lunch, which would usually consist of Kartoffeln and some kind of meat, Oma would ask me to help with her knitting. Lately, this was all we did in the afternoons. We were having the most beautiful weather outside, and I grew more and more frustrated in Oma’s damp apartment. Every morning I would walk to her house as slowly as I could, savoring the sunshine and the smell of fresh lawn clippings, and I would say hello to the old ladies and wish that they were my grandmothers instead of Oma. It didn’t seem fair that there were so many nice ladies and lovely gardens in our street while I had to be babysat by someone who wanted to spend all her time indoors.

  The summer holidays passed incredibly slowly, and after two weeks, I was bored to the point of tears. It was a crucial week on the construction site. They were at the point of dismantling the truss, and my father was paying six roofers twenty crowns an hour each (a lot of money in those days). He needed them to work quickly, because the weather forecast had predicted rain in a week, and it was important to have the roof up by then. My mother and sister were exhausted, and my dad was tense and short-tempered, and even though I didn’t understand what was going on, I was in a sulky mood as well. I didn’t want to go to Oma’s apartment, so I started to behave badly the moment she came to pick me up.

  “Can’t we go to the forest? Just for a little while?” I wheedled as she helped me into my jacket.

  “Not today,” she said distractedly. “I need to buy a few eggs so I can cook you your breakfast.”

  “I don’t want eggs for breakfast!” I cried. “I want to go to the forest! You always say ‘not today,’ and we never end up going. Why can’t we eat here and then go to the forest?”

  “You know very well why we can’t,” Oma told me. “Your kitchen is full of dust. Now come along, put your jacket on and I’ll make you a nice breakfast at my place.”

  “I don’t like your place!” I said angrily. “It’s cold and dark and it smells funny.”

  “Little dwarf, you are trying my patience,” Oma snapped. “Get ready, or I’ll tell your mother you’re being difficult.”

  “I don’t have to do what you tell me all the time,” I blurted. “You’re not my real grandmother!”

  Oma’s eyes widened and she looked very hurt. Without saying a word, she left the living room and went down to the kitchen. I knew that she was going to complain to my mother, and I wished that I could stop her, because I didn’t really mean what I had said. I knew that Oma was doing her best to look after me, and I also knew that my mother would take Oma’s side and make me apologize for being rude. I felt guilty, but I also felt angry, because I didn’t want to spend another lovely day indoors. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I ran to my cot and collected the green mitt from under my pillow, and then I put on my boots and dashed out the front door, turning left and running into the forest.

  “I don’t want to go to Oma’s apartment,” I told the mitt.

  “Me, neither!” the mitt agreed.

  “Oma’s mean and she doesn’t like Barry,” I sniffed.

  “Poor Barry!” the mitt replied. “He’s very lonely now that you spend all your time in Oma’s stupid apartment.”

  “I wish Barry was here,” I said. “If the wolf came along, Barry would bite him.”

  “I wish Barry was here, too,” the mitt said. “He’s much bigger than the wolf, isn’t he?”

  “He’s much bigger,” I said. “The wolf would be afraid to come near us if Barry was here!”

  “Well, we won’t go very far then, will we?” the mitt said nervously. “We’ll just go in a little way.”

  “Okay,”
I agreed. “We won’t go very far.”

  The oak leaves crunched beneath my feet and the trees sighed gently in the wind. I talked loudly to the mitt to stop myself from being afraid. After a while, we came to a crossroads in the path, and I knew from my walks with Oma that the little track that crossed our big one led back to Cernosice. The track was steep, but it leveled out into a dirt road that ran behind Mrs. Liskova’s and Mrs. Noskova’s back gardens.

  “I think we should go up this path here,” I told the mitt.

  “I think so, too,” the mitt agreed.

  “I’m very sad that I made Oma upset,” I said. “Oma’s not so bad, is she?”

  “No, she’s not so bad,” the mitt agreed. “Do you think that the wolf lives nearby?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think he lives a long way away, on the other side of the mountain.”

  “I’m not afraid of the wolf,” the mitt whispered.

  “I’m not afraid of the wolf, either!” I said loudly. “The wolf is just a big and nasty dog who lives in the forest, and if he comes along, I’m going to tell him to go away.”

  I clutched the mitt and quickened my pace.

  “Hurry up,” the mitt whispered. “I can see Mrs. Liskova’s gate.”

  The path curved through the trees to the back of Mrs. Liskova’s house, and I dropped the pretense of bravery and ran for the safety of her garden. I shut the gate behind me and sighed with relief. The forest didn’t look half as scary as it did from the other side of the fence. I walked around to the front of the house, where I found Mrs. Liskova tending her roses.

  “Hello, Mrs. Liskova!” I called out to her. “I’ve come to listen to your stories.”

  “Why, it’s Dominika! How very nice to see you,” the old lady smiled. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I’ve been in the forest all by myself!”

  “Really?” Mrs. Liskova said, brushing the dirt from her knees. “That sounds rather dangerous.”