The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  My father sat on the rim of the tub and lit another cigarette. His hands were dirty and he looked very tired.

  “When I was growing up, my parents used to take me to Pisek for holidays every year,” he said reflectively. “We would catch the train from Ostrava to Prague, and then take the local train out to Pisek, passing through Cernosice along the way.”

  He crumbled some dry mortar from his fingers.

  “Every time we came through, I would look up at these hills,” he sighed. “I would stand next to the window and press my face against the glass. It seemed like such a nice place, especially compared to Ostrava, which was destroyed by the war and then ruined by the Russians. When I was a little boy, Cernosice looked like Heaven. From the moment I saw it, this was where I wanted to live.”

  “What was Ostrava like?”

  “It’s a coal-mining town.There was a lot of coal in the ground that the Russians wanted, so they made our factories and mines work hard to produce it for them. After a while, it became unbearable. The trees and buildings would be covered in coal dust, and the streets would be so hot in summer, the tar would melt and stick to your shoes. You couldn’t swim in the river because it was full of chemicals, and you couldn’t walk across a bridge without holding your nose.”

  “That doesn’t sound very nice,” I said.

  “It wasn’t. It was a rough town full of poor people like my parents. You had to be strong to survive, and even stronger to get out. If there was one thing I knew when I was growing up, it was that I was going to get out as soon as I had the chance.”

  He finished his cigarette and sent the glowing embers floating out into the darkness.

  The sky had turned inky black, the moon and stars smothered by clouds. Dishes and cutlery clattered in the distance, and I could smell the sausages the Haseks were cooking next door. My father put a wash-cloth on his hand and gently soaped my back, and then he rinsed me, shook me dry, and wrapped me up in a towel. He helped me into my pajamas as my sister came up to take her turn in the bath. Then he went back to his wall, continuing to lay bricks in the semidarkness.

  Klara inspected the bath, dipping her hand in the water.

  “It’s dirtier than usual,” she complained.

  “Dominika has been helping me in the yard,” my dad told her.

  “I cleaned a pile of bricks,” I announced to her. “I’ve become very good at hitting them with a hammer.”

  “Great,” my sister said. “And now the water looks like coffee.”

  “At least it’s warm coffee,” my father growled. “It’s cold and black by the time I get to it.”

  Klara sighed and climbed in, while I put on my slippers and trotted down to the kitchen. My mother had just finished cooking kulajda, a traditional Czech meal of potatoes and hard-boiled eggs in white sauce. She had recently started serving our dinners on small plates to make them look bigger, and the delicious smell of the neighbors’ sausages was often quite distracting. I loved my mother’s cooking, though. She could make the tastiest of meals out of the plainest of ingredients.

  We ate dinner together, and then my father attached the TAXI sign to his car and drove away to work the night shift in Prague. Every so often, Dad’s schedule would become very frantic, and I would later learn that this was due to a small group of West Germans personally requesting him whenever they came to town. My father spoke fluent German and had dealt with many Germans during his government years, so whenever a visitor with dissident connections would come to Czechoslovakia, the network put him in touch with my dad and he would become their personal chauffeur. They paid in deutsche marks, which he could exchange on the black market, and often required him to shake off state secret security cars that were tailing them. Westerners were automatically tailed during communism. The secret police liked to lure them to hotels and photograph them in compromising situations. Dad was very familiar with the secret police, and was able to keep his German clients out of trouble.

  After he had driven away, my mother led me upstairs to my cot in the living room, the only room in the house that wasn’t under construction. It was crowded with furniture and all my mother’s books, and there was so little space, my mother and father had to sleep underneath the piano. My cot was in the middle of the room, and I would fall asleep listening to my mum and Klara turn the pages of their books on either side of me. Around sunrise, I would hear my dad return home and crawl under the piano. The strings reverberated as he slumped beside the pedal stand, and the warm hum of the piano always made me feel safe. We had a great piano. It was the Red Countess’s German Steinway grand, and was very rare, as most of the German Steinways had been destroyed during the war. After the court case, my mother expected the Red Countess to reclaim it, but moving the piano was too much trouble for her. So she left it in our villa, and it was the one expensive thing we owned. We were very poor when I was growing up, and selling the piano would have solved a lot of problems, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. It was the piano she had practiced on as a child, and was the one remaining link between her and her parents. She played it beautifully and sadly.

  I HAD SUCH A GOOD TIME cleaning bricks with my hammer, I didn’t want to stop. I worked at the pile every day for a week, and was so determined to clean every brick that my mother eventually had to send me out to play.

  “I was just talking to Mrs. Liskova,” she said one morning. “And she tells me that the ladies have baked you a cake. But they’re worried that you might not want to come around and eat it. They’re afraid that you might be too busy to see them.”

  “They baked me a cake?”

  “Yes. They miss you,” my mother smiled. “They also said they would be happy to read you a story, but they’re afraid that you might be too old for them to read to.”

  “I’m not too old,” I exclaimed. “I’d love to go!”

  “Well, you can,” she said. “I’ve told your father you’re taking the day off, and Mrs. Liskova’s expecting you.”

  I collected my big book of fairy tales and walked down the street. It was a windy day and the trees were changing color. Summer was coming to an end.

  I trotted past Mr. Hasek’s garden, said hello to his dog Alf, and was about to cross the street to Mrs. Liskova’s gate, when a head popped up from behind Mr. Acorn’s fence. The head belonged to a little boy who couldn’t have been much older than me.

  “Hello,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Petr Acorn,” the boy replied. “Are you the girl who ran away from home?”

  “I didn’t run away from home,” I told him. “I went for a walk in the forest. My name is Dominika Furmanova.”

  The boy ducked behind the fence. A moment later, he reappeared with a little girl beside him. The girl had a round face and frizzy hair, and she giggled when she saw me.

  “My name is Mary Hairy. Petr and I have been watching you for ages!”

  “You’ve been watching me?” I was surprised. “How come I haven’t seen you?”

  “We were inside the house,” Petr said. “Whenever we saw you, you were with the old lady with the stick and we were too frightened to come out and say hello.”

  “Is she your grandmother?” Mary asked.

  “She used to be, but now she isn’t,” I explained. “She became too tired and had to have a rest. But now I have three grandmothers! They’ve baked me a cake and I’m on my way to eat it.”

  “They baked you a cake!” Petr exclaimed. “What kind of cake is it? Do you know?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe you could come and have a look. I bet Mrs. Sokolova would let you have a piece.”

  “Mrs. Sokolova can’t be your real grandmother,” Mary pointed out. “If she was, she would live in your house.”

  “I would like her to live in my house, but we don’t have a roof at the moment,” I told her. “So I go and visit her in her apartment instead. Would you like to come with me?”

  Petr looked at Mary. “What do you think?”

 
; “We should ask our parents. Can you wait for us?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The two children ducked back behind the fence. A few minutes later, they reappeared at the gate.

  “We can’t come,” Petr said sadly. “We’re not allowed to play with you.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Petr’s mother said so,” Mary shrugged. “We’re just not allowed.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “Well, maybe we can play together another time. What do you think?”

  “Maybe,” Petr said doubtfully.

  “Okay, then. It was very nice to meet you. Ahoj!”

  And then I crossed the street and climbed the stairs to Mrs. Liskova’s front yard.

  The ladies were sitting at a small table in the garden, chatting and catching what little sun they could. They were happy to see me, and it turned out that they knew Petr Acorn and Mary Hairy’s parents. Mrs. Sokolova’s cake was delicious as usual and, after lunch, Mrs. Liskova read me a long story from my book. Then Mrs. Noskova gave me a jar of her son’s homemade honey and took me around back to see his bee-hives. Each hive was made of a log that had been carved into the shape of a face. The entrance was an open mouth that was either smiling or frowning. The bees took off and landed like airplanes at a busy airport, and Mrs. Noskova frowned as she listened to their drone. She looked up at the sky and studied the clouds, and then we walked back to Mrs. Liskova’s house. By the time we joined the other ladies in the garden, the sun had disappeared.

  “It’s going to rain,” Mrs. Liskova announced. “My joints are aching in all the old places.”

  “The bees are sounding anxious,” Mrs. Noskova agreed. “And the swallows are flying low to the ground.”

  “I think we might be looking at a storm,” Mrs. Sokolova sighed. “The air pressure is low and my ankles are swelling, and I’m really not liking the look of those clouds.”

  As soon as she said this, a loud clap of thunder resounded in the distance, and a fat raindrop fell onto my book.

  “Quick, Dominika. You had better get home while you can,” Mrs. Noskova told me.

  She gave me my jar of honey and sent me out of Mrs. Liskova’s gate, and as I ran up the street, I saw my father on the roof, nailing a thick sheet of plastic to the truss. The wind was howling in the forest, and then the heavens opened and it started to pour. I was completely drenched by the time I reached the house. I had never seen a storm like this before and I was terribly afraid. I huddled in the stairwell with Klara and listened to the thunder, and suddenly all the lights went out.

  “Dad!” I cried. “Dad! Where are you?”

  My father came down from the roof and herded us to the kitchen. We lit all the candles we could find and waited for the storm to go away.

  “I hope we’re not looking at a week of rain,” my mother said nervously.

  “This is nothing,” my father growled. “Just a typical end-of-summer storm. It’ll go away as quickly as it came.”

  But my father was wrong. It continued to pour for the rest of the day, and we fell asleep listening to the rain drumming against the plastic sheet on the roof. It was coming down in buckets the following morning, and the plastic sheet started to leak. A yellow stain appeared on the ceiling, and my mother’s face was very grim.

  “When clouds get trapped between the hills, it often rains until they’re empty,” she observed.

  “That’s the last thing we need,” my father groaned. “This house is built on clay and I have an open foundation beneath the garage. What bad timing!”

  “We had a storm like this when I was sixteen,” my mother remembered. “The whole valley flooded. The river became a lake and a lot of people had to be rescued in boats.”

  “We don’t have to worry about a flood, do we?” my sister asked. “We’re right at the top of the hill.”

  “Exactly,” my father said. “You worry too much, Jana! I can fix the ceiling when the rain stops. The furniture is safe, so the main thing is to stop the water from ruining the carpet and the floorboards. Let’s get to work.”

  We used cooking pots to catch the drips, and I spent the day running around the house and emptying them while my parents and sister worked in the rain. My dad decided that the best thing to do would be to finish the upstairs walls, so my mother and Klara carried buckets of mortar up to him while he frantically laid the bricks I had cleaned. I went up to the roof and looked out across the valley, and it was really like we were sailing the stormy seas. The plastic sheet rippled violently, like a sail, and the treetops buckled and thrashed in the wind. After two days, the river burst its banks and flooded into the neighboring fields, and a few of the houses at the bottom of the hill had to be evacuated.

  By the end of the third day, my father finished the walls. He had worked more or less without a break, using a hurricane lamp throughout the night, and while the rain may have pounded the plastic sheet into submission and our garden may have turned into a swamp, it started to look like we might survive the storm. We had saved the floorboards and most of the carpet, and the ceiling plaster had miraculously held. My mother cooked the first hot meal of the week and we gathered in the kitchen to eat it. We were incredibly exhausted, and my father’s hands shook as he lifted his fork. He didn’t say a word, but I could tell he was proud that his family had faced adversity so well. In his yellow raincoat and hat, he looked like an old sea captain who had somehow managed to save his boat from sinking.

  “I was listening to the weather forecast on the radio,” he said finally. “The storm should be over tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Thank God!” my mother said. “I really thought the ceilings were going to collapse!”

  “That’s because you always anticipate the worst,” my father scolded. “Things are never as bad as you expect them to be. In a funny kind of way, the storm has been beneficial. It forced us to get the walls up quickly. Now all we have to do is tile the roof!”

  This was a classic example of my father’s crazy optimism. My dad, by all accounts, had lived a terrible life. Not only had he grown up in the most abject poverty, but he had been forced to work in the coal mines as a teenager and had been buried alive on two occasions. He had struggled through university and was just beginning to settle into his government job as an engineer when the Russian invasion dashed his hopes and dreams. In spite of this, he was bewilderingly positive. Many people would have resented driving taxis for a living, but my father convinced himself that he really loved the work. He paid a friendly policeman to issue him false papers and cheerfully drove around Prague under the full scrutiny of the STB. He was pulled over and interrogated many times, but the secret police never thought to question his license. Despite the obvious danger, he enjoyed the challenge of making a living on his own terms.

  “Nothing like hard work to make you sleep well at night!” he would declare. “When I go to bed, I sleep the sleep of the righteous!”

  WE ATE OUR HOT DINNER and went upstairs to the living room. It was still raining heavily, and I watched my father crawl under the piano. He got down on all fours and inched his way toward the mattress, and my mother had to massage his back and shoulders before he was able to relax enough to lie down properly.

  I fell asleep the moment I lay down in my cot, and was awakened later by the sound of my father running up the stairs. He was shining a flashlight around the room, his voice unusually urgent. I immediately knew that something terrible had happened.

  “Get up, Jana!” I heard him whisper. “Quickly! The kitchen is ankle deep in water!”

  “What?” my mother said sleepily, sitting up and banging her head against the underside of the keyboard.

  “We’re flooded!” my dad said hoarsely. “Don’t ask me how, we just are!”

  We ran downstairs to survey the damage, and it was worse than any scenario my mother could have dreamed up. It turned out that an underground creek ran the whole way down the hill, and the flood had made it swell up and burst through the foundati
on trench my father had dug between the house and the garage. Water poured from the trench, and it was like we had a mountain stream gushing from one end of the house to the other. The force of the water had stripped all the topsoil off the garden, and the kitchen and Mr. Kozel’s old apartment were flooded.

  A thick layer of clay covered everything in sight, and our backyard was starting to slide down the hill.

  “It’s washing away the foundations of the house!” my father cried. “We’re going to have to dig drains or else the house will collapse!”

  “Jezis Marja!” My mother turned pale.

  My father sprang into action. He gave my mother a hoe and sent her to dig a drainage ditch in the garden. Then he took Klara and me into the kitchen, gave us each a bucket, and told us to bail as much water as we could out of the window. Finally, he threw off his shirt and leaped into the foundation trench. Wielding a mattock and a spade, he attacked the muddy clay with all his might, attempting to block the creek. It was such a futile task. The water was too strong, and he quickly realized that the only thing he could do was try and save the foundations of the house by diverting the water around them. He dug a network of drains, but for every two spadefuls of clay he threw out, one would immediately slide back. He wedged pieces of wood to stop the drain walls from collapsing, and shoveled clay without a break well into the morning.

  Klara and I bailed frantically in the kitchen. I was too small to lift the buckets, so we had a system where I would fill the empty one with a saucepan while my sister tipped the full one out the window. We worked as quickly as we could, but the water kept rising. After four or five hours of filling and lifting, we were dizzy with fatigue. The rain showed no sign of letting up, and my sister and I were crying as we worked. Eventually, my father burst into the room.

  “Klara! We’re not going to make it on our own!” he said. “You’re going to have to run and ask the neighbors for help!”

  Asking for help was not something my father did easily, but there was no mistaking the desperation in his voice. My sister abandoned the buckets and ran out into the rain, while my dad went back to digging drains. I was left alone in the kitchen with my little saucepan. I stood on a chair to empty the saucepan out the window, but the water had risen past my knees, and when I accidentally stood on the floor, it completely filled my rubber boots. I became very frightened and went outside to find my mother.