“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you,” he said to my mother as she poured milk in his coffee. “You look as beautiful as ever.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she smiled. “You’re looking good, too.”
“I’m going to be seventy next week,” he told her.
“I know,” my mother sighed.
“Are you going to have a party?” I asked. “We could come and bring you a present!”
“I’m going to have a small celebration at home,” he replied. “But perhaps you could come to the hospital next Wednesday afternoon and we could have a small party right here.”
“We’ll come, won’t we, Mum?”
“Of course,” my mother said. “How are things at home?”
“All right,” Dr. Cermak shrugged. “You know how it is.”
For the next half an hour, he, my mother, and I had a wonderful time together. I asked him questions about his work as a surgeon, and he told me about some of the patients whose lives he had saved. He also told me about his love of classical music and the symphonies of his favorite composers, and promised to bring his violin and play for me the next time we met, and we shook hands on it. I invited him to my Christmas show and promised to bring him a present the following Wednesday, and then a nurse knocked on the door.
“Excuse me, comrade surgeon,” she said. “But we have an urgent case in Theater Four.”
“Tell Comrade Vacek I’ll be right there,” Dr. Cermak replied. He turned to my mother and took her hands in his.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go now,” he said. “I’m so happy you came. I had a lovely time with you and your daughter, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you next week.”
“Thanks, Dad,” my mother smiled tearfully. “Say hello to Mum and Auntie Mary from me.”
“Yes, yes, I will,” he said distractedly. He got up, and as he ushered us out of his office, he bent down to kiss me on the cheek.“You’re a very special girl, Dominika,” he told me. “I’m very glad you asked your mother to bring you here to see me.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I knew you’d be our friend again. I just knew it!”
After we left the hospital, my mother called Mrs. Sprislova to explain why I had missed my ballet lesson, and then she took me up to the famous Hanavsky Pavilion at the top of the Letna Gardens, and bought me a caramel ice cream as a special treat.
“Thank you, Trumpet,” she said. “I’ve wanted to talk to my dad for such a long time. You did a really great thing for me today.”
“He’s nice,” I told her. “And look, we can see his hospital window from the gardens. And we really know that he’s in there saving someone’s life right now! Isn’t that good?”
“Yes, it’s very good,” my mother smiled.
When we got home, I worked hard on the “Waltz of the Marionette,” so that my grandfather would be impressed. My mother made me a costume for the show, which was a black leotard with a little lace tutu and lots of pretty blue rhinestones sewn into the material. On the Monday before my grandfather’s birthday, I nagged her until she agreed to leave the Economic Institute early so that we could go shopping in Wenceslaus Square. I wanted to buy Dr. Cermak a present.
“We’ll get him another big cup for his desk,” I declared. “He looked very sad when he had to drink his coffee out of a teacup, didn’t he?”
“He did,” my mother agreed. “Your grandfather has always had a big cup for his coffee. Surgeons drink lots of coffee because it helps them stay awake when they work long hours.”
We walked up Wenceslaus Square to a store called the Diamond. Czechoslovakia has always been famous for its porcelain and crystal, and the Diamond was one of the best places to buy kitchenware. We took the escalator to the second floor and found the part of the shop that sold cups and saucers.
“How about this one?” my mother suggested.
“It’s not big enough,” I told her.
“You’re right,” she laughed. “So which one do you think we should get?”
“This one!” I said. “It’s big, but it’s also the same color as his teacups. This way, they all match.”
I selected a cup covered in tiny pink roses, and we carried it to the cash register at the front of the shop.
“Hello,” I said to the lady behind the counter. “This is a present for my granddad, Dr. Wenceslaus Cermak. He’s going to be seventy years old the day after tomorrow!”
“Is he now?” the lady said. “Would you like me to wrap it up in special paper?”
“Yes, please!” I told her. “He’s a famous surgeon and he broke his special cup, so we’re buying him a new one.”
The saleswoman smiled at my mother and pulled a box out from beneath her counter. The box contained the same cup as the one I had selected, and she wrapped it up in a sheet of crepe paper.
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate such a lovely present,” she said as she tied the package with a ribbon.
“I hope so!” I said. “I only met him for the first time last week, but he’s going to come and see me dance in the Christmas ballet.”
“He’ll be very proud of you, I’m sure,” the lady told me.
FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I was dizzy with excitement. All I could think about was how happy my grandfather would be when he opened his present. I pictured him with his violin in his hands, playing me snatches of Mozart and Handel. My mother and I would visit him regularly. And I imagined how once the Cermaks were friends with my parents again, the whole family would come and see me dance Odette at the Smetana Theater when I was older. My grandmother Kveta, Auntie Mary, and my granddad would sit next to my parents and Klara in the nicest box in the theater and watch me through their opera glasses.
On Wednesday morning, I put Dr. Cermak’s present in my backpack and carried it carefully to the Economic Institute. The day passed very slowly, but when it was over, I took my mother’s hand and excitedly led her down through Mala Strana to the little bakery near the bridge, where we had ordered a cake for my grandfather’s party. We picked up the cake and crossed the Charles Bridge, walking up the quay until we came to the Frantisek Hospital. This time, we weren’t afraid to go inside. We climbed the steps and walked along the corridor to my grandfather’s office. It was five o’clock, the time we had arranged to meet, and my mother knocked briskly on the door.
There was a long silence.
My mother knocked again, and as she did, I suddenly noticed that the key wasn’t in the latch like it had been the last time.
“Mum,” I whispered. “The key’s not there.”
The most abject look passed across my mother’s face. She knocked again, and this time we heard someone moving around inside the room. A key turned in the lock and the door swung open a little bit, and my grandfather’s face appeared in the crack.
“Happy birthday, Granddad!” I exclaimed.
Dr. Cermak’s eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, and the lines around his mouth were very harsh. He tried to close the door in our faces, but my mother planted her foot inside the gap.
“What are you doing, Dad?” she cried.
“Go away!” My grandfather hissed. “You’re not welcome.”
“What?” my mother gasped.
“But Granddad, we’ve brought you a cake and a present!” I said, taking off my backpack to try to show him the package. “We’ve bought you a cup to replace the one you’ve broken!”
“I don’t want any presents from you,” Dr. Cermak snapped.
My mother’s foot was still jammed between the door and the door-frame, and she was pushing against the knob with all her might. She looked angry and determined, and my grandfather looked absolutely miserable.
“You can’t do this,” I heard my mother say. “This is your granddaughter!”
“I have no granddaughters,” Dr. Cermak said again. “Don’t you understand? I have one daughter and two grandsons.”
I stared at my grandfather in amazement. The man in the doorway was nothing like the kind, mu
sic-loving gentleman I had met the previous week.
“Get your foot out of my door or I’ll call hospital security!”
My mother continued to struggle against him.
“Mum has made you do this, hasn’t she?” she said.
My grandfather’s face twisted up in pain. His lips started to quiver and his eyes were full of tears. “Let me be,” he begged. “Go away, please.”
“Why?” my mother asked.
“You know why, Jana,” he replied. “I’ll always love you, but please, just get out and never come back!”
They looked at each other for a long moment, and then my mother removed her foot from the door and Dr. Cermak slammed it shut in our faces.
I held my little backpack in my hands and tried to understand what had happened. For some reason, my grandfather couldn’t be friends with us anymore. He had wanted to, but something had made him change his mind. I thought the Red Countess must be very strong indeed to make her good husband act against his will. It would be many years before I understood this properly; before I learned that my grandmother’s power came from a regime that could crush her husband as surely as it was trying to crush her daughter, and that this power was like fire. It was a good servant but a bad master. One of the most insidious things about communism was that it pushed good people to the brink of immorality and then required them to cross the threshold. Thousands of families would be torn apart at this brink, for the simple reason that some people are capable of sacrificing their ideals while others aren’t. But the ones who crossed over—even music-loving surgeons who saved people’s lives—would forever be at the service of the party, even if the party was supposed to be serving them.
I looked up at my mother.
“Let’s go,” she said quietly.
She led me out of the hospital, threw my grandfather’s cake in the first trash can she could find, and we walked in silence to the Old Town Square. We sat on the steps of the Jan Hus statue. My mother was oddly calm, but her knuckles were white and her hands were balled into fists.
“Come here, little one,” she said. “Come here and sit on my lap.” I threw my arms around her neck and she pressed her face into my jacket, and after a few moments, I felt her shoulders heave.
“Don’t cry, Mummy,” I said. But she cried and cried, and soon enough I cried, too.
I looked up over her shoulder and could see Jan Hus towering above us. The incorruptible priest who had said no to the pope. Five hundred years earlier, he had stood at his own moral brink and chosen the worst kind of death instead of sacrificing his ideals, and my grandparents had been so moved by his courage, they gave their daughter his name during the German occupation. They had wanted an idealist, but they had got more than they bargained for. Because as terrible and hurtful as the family split was, the likelihood of my mother crossing the Communist threshold was as impossible and remote as their ever being able to cross back.
Some things you simply can’t do or undo.
five
THE LITTLE COGNAC PEAK
THAT CHRISTMAS, I danced the “Waltz of the Marionette” in Mrs. Sprislova’s show, and while it was exciting to be the center of attention for an evening, I could tell that my parents and Mrs. Sokolova were forcing themselves to be happy for me. My mother was devastated by her father’s behavior, and Mrs. Sokolova was upset because Mrs. Liskova had gone away. Both Mrs. Liskova and Mrs. Noskova had been confined to their beds in the weeks before they disappeared, and I had visited them many times. They had both seemed very calm, and Mrs. Liskova had told me that she was really looking forward to joining her friends. In my mind, the ladies had gone somewhere nice and warm to get better, and while I couldn’t wait for them to come home, it occurred to me that wherever they had gone might have been so nice and so warm, they might not be coming home anytime soon. At least not in the middle of winter.
After the performance, we dropped Mrs. Sokolova off, and then we went down to our kitchen for a snack before dinner. I was still wearing my costume and had changed back into my piskoty slippers.
“Dad, do you think we could go and see Mrs. Liskova and Mrs. Noskova?” I asked. “I was thinking that maybe we could take Mrs. Sokolova with us, and we could all have a holiday together.”
“That would be one hell of a holiday,” my sister laughed.
“Klara,” my mother snapped. “We won’t have any of that kind of talk, thank you.”
My sister sighed mightily and threw her tea in the sink, and then she stalked from the room with my mother right behind her. I listened to them arguing all the way up the stairs. My mother’s temper had been very short ever since our disastrous visit to her father, and I really hated it when she became angry, because she wasn’t an angry person. She was usually very sweet.
I looked at my dad, and he shook his head glumly.
“She’s still upset,” he shrugged.
“I was hoping my dancing would cheer her up,” I told him. “But what do you think about us going to visit the ladies? Do you think we have enough money to go on holiday?”
The expression on my father’s face was serious, and it looked like he was about to say something important. But the second I asked if we had enough money to go on holiday, his eyes lit up and he flashed me one of his wheeler-dealer smiles.
“It’s funny you should ask,” he said.
He crossed the room and closed the kitchen door, and then he opened the window so he could smoke a cigarette.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked me.
“You know I can!” I was, in fact, a terrible keeper of secrets. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise!”
“All right, then,” my father grinned. “An interesting thing happened in the cab the other day. I was driving an old man who lives in Semily, which is a little town near the mountains in the north. His family had a nice big farm, and an agricultural cooperative came and took it from them almost thirty years ago. The Communists who did the collectivizing were the worst farmers around, and this poor fellow was forced to hand everything over to a group of village thugs he had known since childhood. When he tried to say no, they threatened to throw him in prison and send his sons to the military service, so he lost a property that had been in his family for over two hundred and fifty years.”
My father blew a jet of smoke out of the window and lowered his voice confidentially.
“Now. Up in the hills above the farm is a little mountain chalet, which the man tells me is just wonderful. It’s perfect for skiing and it’s great in summer, and the men who run the cooperative have basically been going there every weekend since the fifties. The cooperative forced him to sign a thirty-year lease on the chalet in 1950, so from the first of January, 1980, the property will belong to him again. And he’s desperate to sell it.”
“Do you think he might sell it to you, Dad?” I asked excitedly.
“Well, this is what we were talking about,” my father said. “The man is afraid that if he doesn’t sell it, the cooperative will force him to sign another lease. The men are a bunch of old drunks now, but the fellow in my cab is old as well, and he’s still afraid of them. The head of the cooperative has made his life hell for thirty years. But there’s a slight chance the cooperative will forget to re-sign the lease before the first of January, and if that happens, the man can sell me his chalet and walk away.”
My eyes widened. “We would have our own holiday house!” I exclaimed. “I could practice my skiing.”
“Yes, you could,” my dad agreed. “I’m going to drive to Semily next week to have a look, and if the chalet is as wonderful as the man says, I’m thinking of making him an offer. Apart from anything else, it will be a good investment.”
“What does Mum think?” I asked.
“Your mother doesn’t know. That’s why it’s a secret,” my dad replied. “She will only worry herself silly about what the cooperative will do if we buy the chalet from under them. The best thing is to just wait and see what happens. A bunch of Communists
I can handle. Your mother’s nerves, I can’t. So, can I count on you to keep this a secret for the next couple of weeks?”
“Yes!” I cried. “I won’t say a word to anyone. I swear!”
I MANAGED TO KEEP my father’s plans to myself for the rest of the holidays, and, even more amazingly, everything worked out the way my father had hoped. The agricultural cooperative did forget to renew their lease, so my dad bought the chalet on New Year’s Day. The ex-farmer had only wanted ten thousand crowns for it, but my father ended up paying him sixteen so that he and his family would have some compensation for the hardship they had suffered.
“You realize you’re going to have some trouble with the cooperative,” the man told my dad after the deed had changed hands.
“Oh, yes,” my father said happily.
As my dad suspected, my mother reacted to the surprise with a mixture of happiness and trepidation. When her back was against the wall, she could fight with as much ferocity as my father, but her style was to avoid conflict, and there was no escaping the fact that there would be plenty of conflict when we went to Semily to take possession of our chalet. The way she saw it, we were setting ourselves up for the same kind of problems we were having in Cernosice. If the cooperative controlled the balance of opinion in the town, they could make our holidays very unpleasant. Not to mention the fact that they could simply refuse to respect the change of ownership. They did, after all, have the State behind them.
“The trick will be to go in with a total show of force,” my father growled. “The outcome of most disputes is decided in the first five minutes, so we’ll give these old drunks five minutes they’ll never forget.”
“If you say so, dear,” my mother sighed.
The first week of January was notorious for unofficial holidays, and after my sister and I made it very clear that we weren’t prepared to wait for the weekend, my mother agreed to break her perfect attendance record at the Economic Institute. We loaded the car while she worked up the nerve to call in sick, and as my dad attached Barry’s trailer to the back of the Skoda, I ran down the street to tell Mrs. Sokolova the news.
The Twelve Little Cakes Page 14