“I’m very sorry, Mr. Woodpecker,” I said under my breath. “I hope you find another place to live in.”
I led Barry away from the gate as my dad cupped his hands and called out to Mr. Pinos. “Okay. Come on down,” he ordered. “Take it nice and slowly. You should be able to drive over the stump without too much trouble.”
We looked up at the path and listened to Mr. Pinos as he reluctantly revved the tractor’s engine. He had been very nervous driving his own truck down this incline, but the tractor was ten times more frightening. It was bigger and heavier and Soviet-made, and, as Mr. Pinos quickly discovered, completely without brakes. A small detail the farmer had neglected to share.
I held Barry’s collar and watched. Mr. Pinos started quite slowly but quickly gathered speed, and by the time he was halfway to the gate, the tractor was literally bouncing through the forest. It made a tremendous amount of noise, and as it crashed and rattled toward the house, I could see Mr. Pinos in the cab. His eyes were very wide and his mouth was open. He held the wheel at arm’s length and screamed the whole way down the hill, and I leaped back in amazement as the tractor shot through the gate, jolted over the top of the tree stump, and hurtled toward the stone fence on the opposite side of the garden. It looked for all the world like Mr. Pinos would crash, but as he slewed across the mud pile, he did a remarkable thing. Somehow, he managed to activate the primitive digging arm, and as my dad, Barry, and I held our collective breath, he brought the arm over the top of the cabin and planted the spade in the mud directly in front of the front wheels. The tractor jerked violently. For an electrifying couple of seconds, it looked like it was going to somersault over the arm and keep going, but it didn’t. The rear wheels flew up in the air and the entire machine stood on end, and then it slowly crashed back down to earth. We hurried over and found Mr. Pinos spread-eagled across the hood, his hands firmly grasping the steering wheel behind him. His mouth was still open and all the blood had drained from his face.
“That was incredible!” My father whistled. “Are you all right?”
“No brakes!” Mr. Pinos whispered. “The goddamn tractor didn’t have any brakes!”
My dad had to pry his hands loose from the wheel and help him into Mr. Kozel’s apartment. He told me to fetch some beer and pickles from the kitchen, and set about calming Mr. Pinos down.
I fetched two beers and a jar of pickles and then walked out into the yard, where I found the farmer and his grandson checking the tractor for damage. Once they had satisfied themselves that the digging arm still worked, they disappeared through the side gate and hastily climbed the hill to their truck, and I heard them start it a few minutes later, around the same time Mr. Pinos staggered out into the yard. Despite his remarks about seeing a job through to the end, it was obvious that his covert mission was over. Whatever the STB was paying him, it wasn’t enough to compensate him for the life-threatening experience of working with my dad. He collected his tools and we helped him load his ladder into his truck, and he looked truly miserable as he drove off down the street. I could tell that he bitterly regretted the day he had knocked on our door.
I looked at my dad, who had a wistful smile on his face.
“Those three men just might have saved our house,” he said thoughtfully. “I think the worst might be over.”
There was a distant squeal of brakes from the bottom of the valley, and the smile disappeared from my father’s face. My mother’s train had just pulled into the station.
“Mum is going to be very upset that you cut down her tree,” I said.
“You’re right,” my dad agreed. “The worst isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination.”
He grabbed Mr. Glatz’s chain saw and tidied up the tree stump. Then we nervously awaited my mother’s arrival. I had never seen my mother really angry before, but I somehow knew that it would be terrible. My father seemed to understand this as well. We stood beside the fallen tree like criminals, and Barry came over and sat down beside us. With his sad, bloodshot eyes, he looked even more guilty than my dad.
“We’re going to get in a lot of trouble,” I told him.
The words had scarcely left my mouth when a high-pitched howl floated down from the balcony. We looked up to see my mother disappearing into the living room. A few moments later, she burst out into the yard, her anguished cries increasing in pitch and volume. She ran furiously through the mud toward us, wobbling unsteadily in her high heels.
“How could you?” she shrieked. She raced over to my father and started to beat her fists against his chest. “You promised me you wouldn’t touch it! You promised!”
“Janitchka,” my dad said, using the diminutive of my mother’s name. “I feel terrible about cutting down the tree, believe me, but I had to do it to save the garden. I’ll take the wood to a sawmill and make you a nice bed out of the timber, okay?”
“Don’t you ‘Janitchka’ me!” my mother roared. “A bed? You can take the wood and make me a coffin! Do you hear me? A coffin!”
She continued to scream and hit my father’s chest, and then she whirled around and stalked back to the house. To my great surprise, my dad didn’t follow her. He just sat down on the tree stump and lit himself a cigarette. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I ran inside and found my mother throwing clothes into a suitcase. Her lips were tightly compressed and her face was very white, and there was a look in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before. She packed her suitcase, and then she sat on the piano stool and cried for a very long time. I tiptoed over and put my arms around her knees.
“Please don’t be angry, Mummy.”
My mother didn’t answer. When she had finished crying, she stood up and carried her suitcase to the door. If she had had somewhere to go, I’m pretty sure she would have left. But the sad truth was that she had no family or friends to turn to. She had made her bed and had no choice but to lie in it with her husband and children. While the adversity of being a dissident was often unbearable, it kept my parents together in many situations where they might have otherwise divorced. My mother stood at the door for a while with the suitcase in her hand, and then she looked at me and sighed.
“I should probably make you and Klara some dinner,” she said. “If you go to the kitchen and get some onions from the pantry, I’ll come down and join you in a few minutes.”
We had a very tense dinner. My father tried to make cheerful conversation while my mother subjected him to the most withering of silences, and the second we had finished, she left the table and stormed upstairs. Klara, Dad, and I huddled together in the kitchen until we ran out of things to wash and dry, and then we summoned our courage and went up to the living room.
We found my mother reading a book under the piano. She had carried a single mattress down from the garage and positioned it on the opposite side of the pedal stand from the mattress she usually shared with my dad. My father crawled beneath the piano and attempted to reason with her, but she made it very clear that she would have nothing to do with him. In the end, he sent Klara and me up to the bathroom. We shared a bath and changed into our pajamas, and then my father came up in a very bleak mood. Without saying a word, he pulled himself up through the beams of the truss, and then he sat on the exposed roof, smoking cigarettes and looking out across the valley.
“Dobrou noc, Dad,” I sniffed. “Night, night.”
“Dobrou noc, Little Trumpet,” he said gently. “Don’t worry. Tomorrow is a new day. We’ll wake up in the morning and everything will be back to normal, I promise.”
“I hope so,” I said tearfully.
I followed Klara downstairs and crawled into my cot. I felt terribly afraid. I understood that things were hard for my parents, but as long as they loved each other, the outside world didn’t matter very much. When they fought, it was worse than an army of secret policemen sniffing around our house, and the image of my mother’s suitcase beside the front door was so haunting I found it hard to fall asleep. After what seemed like hours, I heard my father co
me down from the roof and run himself a fresh bath. Some time after that, he crept into the living room and crawled beneath the piano, and then the whole room became very quiet and still.
I awoke to the familiar sound of birds chirping in the forest, and the warm, safe hum of my grandmother’s piano. I opened my eyes and listened. There was no mistaking the sound of my dad moving around to the other side of the pedal stand. The piano sang as he bumped the frame with his shoulders, and I could hear him whispering to my mother in the same way he did every morning when he came home from work. After a moment’s pause, I heard my mother whisper back, and I snuggled happily in my blankets as the predawn light seeped into the room.
It was indeed a new morning, and my dad had kept his promise.
We would wake up and face the day together as a family.
four
THE SWAN
MY DAD WORKED TIRELESSLY on the roof for the next three months, padding the space between the rafters with big pillows of asbestos and laying all the tiles before the snow started to fall. Despite his efforts, we had a cold and austere winter. Our boiler and central heating remained broken, and the topsoil my father laid in the yard didn’t mix well with the clay. Whenever it rained, the garden turned to mud, and countless pairs of shoes and boots were ruined. We had a nice, level yard that was impossible to walk on. Even when it was covered with snow, it was so sludgy and horrible that no one except my father was prepared to brave it.
Barry spent most of his time on Mr. Kozel’s doorstep, howling indignantly until we let him in downstairs.
We spent our winter nights in the kitchen, watching television and drinking tea and hot soup, and I was delighted to see Barry on TV at Christmas once again. There was a carp in the bath and the Baby Jesus sneaked another tree into the house without my catching him. The highlight of Christmas, though, was the morning my father took Klara and me upstairs to see the bedroom he had built us. The walls were roughly plastered and would require a few coats of paint, but the room had a big window that looked out across the valley and there was plenty of space for both of us. My sister was particularly happy. She was fourteen years old and this was her first bedroom. She immediately claimed the space beside the window and announced that she wanted to paint the walls yellow.
“When I catch my breath, I’ll build you a room next door,” my father told me.
“I like this bedroom!” I assured him. “And I like sharing with Klara. It’s nice to have someone in the room with me at nighttime!”
“Nice for you,” Klara said. “Some of us like to read or sleep when we’re in bed. You just like to talk.”
“I like to read and sleep, too, but I like to have someone there in case I get scared,” I admitted.
A few weeks after Klara and I had settled into our new room, my mother woke up earlier than usual one morning and left the house while it was still dark. She returned home that evening with a mysterious smile on her face, and we later discovered that she had spent the morning standing in the freezing cold, waiting to buy tickets for the National Theater Ballet Company’s production of Swan Lake. Tickets for the performing arts were very cheap, but the price was offset by the long time you had to stand in line to buy them. Working-class families were usually too busy to wait, so the tickets that weren’t automatically sent to high-ranking party officials tended to be snapped up by housewives and pensioners who would bring sleeping bags to the box office and camp out. On this occasion, my mother had managed to outwait the waiters, and she was rewarded with four excellent box seats, which was the family’s present to me for my fourth birthday.
I was very excited about turning four. My dad had removed the bars of my cot so that I could sleep in a proper bed, like my sister, and whenever he and I went driving, I would sit on the passenger seat instead of climbing into the space behind the gearbox. I was growing up quickly, even though I was still small for my age. The night of my birthday, my mother cooked a delicious dinner and then we took a bath and put on our best clothes. My father sucked in his tummy and squeezed into his old tuxedo, while my mother put on a lovely red silk dress and one of her exquisite hats. Despite the fact that we didn’t have much money, my mother always looked great whenever she went out in Prague. She knew a good tailor who was able to work magic on the expensive clothes she had worn as a teenager. My mother still had the figure of a seventeen-year-old, so most of those clothes still fit. With a bit of clever tailoring, they could be altered to look like the most recent fashions. The material was of the highest quality, as the Red Countess had used her party connections to buy her daughters clothes made in Paris and Milan. All of my mother’s dresses were at least fifteen years old, but she took such good care of them that she really was one of the best-dressed women in Prague. She knew how to match colors and accessories, and could throw on the most flamboyant of hats with an aristocratic carelessness. Hats were a big part of who my mother was. She wore them defiantly, knowing that they were symbolic of the capitalist values the party elite pretended to despise (while secretly raising their children to embrace them), and she would be damned if she was going to dress badly to keep a bunch of hypocrites in the Politburo happy.
When we were all ready, my father picked my mother up and carried her to the garage to save her shoes from the mud, and then we drove to Prague. The Smetana Theater was a small but elegant neoclassical building at the top of Wenceslaus Square. We walked through the lobby and up a wide marble staircase to the first floor, where we were intercepted by an old lady who inspected our tickets and led us to our box. Inside, I crawled into my mother’s lap and pressed my chin against the velvet upholstering of the balustrade, looking out through the opera glasses my father had rented for ten crowns. Then the orchestra walked out into the pit and started to tune their instruments. Ripples ran across the curtain, and the enormous chandelier was slowly pulled up through a reverse trapdoor. The lights dimmed, and I held my breath as the conductor appeared and tapped his baton on the stand. For a few moments nothing happened, and then the curtains drew open as a sad and beautiful overture surged up from the pit. Blue and white spotlights transformed the stage into a lake, and a flock of swans fluttered around the swan princess, Odette. As the music dipped and swelled, she began to dance on the silver surface of the lake, barely touching the stage with the points of her slippers. She was incredibly graceful, and it was just like watching a real swan gliding across the water. Then the kettledrums sounded, and the swans and Odette looked up in alarm. A moment later, a muscular prince bounded out onto the stage, and I almost dropped my opera glasses in astonishment. The prince was blond and handsome, and was exactly how I imagined a prince should be. I watched as he swept Odette off the ground and twirled her majestically above his head, and when he gently swung her back down to the stage, she seemed to be as much in love with him as I was. It was as though he had captured her heart with the grace and precision of his dancing, and now she couldn’t take a step without swooning into his arms.
“I like the prince,” I told my mother during intermission. “He’s strong and handsome, like Prince Bajaja!”
“His name is Jaroslav Slavicky,” my mother said, reading from the program. “He’s the son of a famous composer.”
“I would like to marry him,” I announced. “If I married him, that would make me a princess, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe it would,” my mother laughed. “But don’t you think he’ll be too old for you by the time you’re ready to marry?”
“I hope not.” That worried me. “How old is he now?”
“Shh,” my mother whispered. The golden chandelier had disappeared again and the house lights were starting to dim.
I spent the next hour imagining that I was Odette up there dancing with Mr. Slavicky. My childhood (and my imagination) was greatly influenced by Czech fairy tales, but as I watched Swan Lake, it occurred to me that Mr. Slavicky was a real prince, even if he didn’t come from a royal family and live in a castle. For the two and a half hours that he danc
ed, his kingdom was the stage and the lake, and everyone in the Smetana Theater was transfixed by his performance. When the curtains finally closed and opened and the dancers moved forward to take their bows, I applauded as loudly as I could and continued clapping long after everybody else had finished. From that moment on, I knew that what I wanted most in the world was to become a ballet dancer. When we arrived home, I leaped out of the car and danced all the way from the garage to the front door, humming part of Swan Lake as I kicked off my muddy sandals. My parents watched with amusement, but Klara frowned and tapped the side of her head as though she thought I was crazy.
“I hope she’s not going to start dancing all the time,” she told my mother. “Talking I can put up with, but if it’s going to be talking and dancing, our bedroom isn’t big enough for both of us.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” my mother replied. “I’m sure she’ll wake up in the morning and find something else to do.”
But my mother was wrong. The first thing I did when I climbed out of bed was try to stand on the tips of my toes. Then I began to dance. I danced to the sound of Radio Free Europe; to the marching band music that echoed out of the speakers mounted on every telegraph pole in the village; even to the squeal of my dad’s circular saw. If it was quiet, I would dance to the melodies I invented in my head. I performed for Barry at least three times a day. He wasn’t a very receptive audience, though. He would fall asleep before my performances ended, so I took to dancing for the old ladies instead. The cold weather had confined them to their apartments, so they were always happy to see me, and I would perform in their kitchens and living rooms while they sat in their armchairs doing their best to encourage me.
The Twelve Little Cakes Page 11