The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  Everyone immediately froze.

  “Klara! Dominika! What kind of masquerade is this?” my dad growled.

  Within seconds, the dance floor was empty. My sister and I were the only people left standing.

  “Get your things,” my father ordered.

  My sister collected her handbag while her friends stared intensely at their shoes. A few of the boys who had worked in our yard muttered, “Dobry den, Mr. Furman,” but my dad ignored them and took Klara by the elbow and led her from the room. We drove home in silence, and Klara and I were sent down to the kitchen, which was where the family conferences took place. Except for the time I had run away from home, my parents had never been angry at me directly, but I had seen my father yell at Klara, and it was a terrible thing to behold. We were both on the verge of tears as we stood in the kitchen and waited for the ordeal to start. My dad wasted no time in laying down the law.

  “If you have time to sneak away from your duties at home, you have time for a proper job,” he told my sister. “We understand that you want to be independent, but independence has to be paid for. From now on, during the summer holidays and every weekend, you’ll be working at my mother’s buffet at the Florenc bus station.”

  The blood drained from Klara’s face.

  “Hilda’s buffet?” she said incredulously.

  “Your grandmother has kindly offered to employ you,” my mother said. “Dominika will take over your milk run and you can start earning your pocket money like everyone else.”

  “But I don’t want to work at Hilda’s buffet,” Klara spluttered.

  “Well that’s the price you pay for being dishonest and setting a bad example for your sister,” my mother snapped. “Maybe in the future you’ll think twice about lying to your parents.”

  Klara burst into tears and ran upstairs in an absolute rage, and when she came into our bedroom that evening, she wordlessly threw herself on top of me and read a book for half an hour. I struggled beneath her and tried to explain that I hadn’t meant to snitch, but she not only ignored me for the rest of the week, she continued to ignore me for the rest of the year. As the seasons merged and we adjusted to our new routines, Klara made a ritual of punishing me every day she had to work at the buffet by smothering me while she read her book the same evening. After a while, I learned to stop fighting and conserved my breath instead.

  Sending my sister to work with my grandmother actually turned out to be a huge mistake, but it would be many years before my parents understood this. Once Klara and Hilda got past their personal differences, my sister not only received a crash course in under-the-table capitalism, she also picked up a few of my grandmother’s more cynical personal philosophies and found them more to her liking than the strict moral code my mother preached at home. Hilda was a wheeler-dealer like my dad, but she had spent her young adulthood raising a family in poverty, and her view was that she had wasted a golden opportunity by failing to exploit her sexuality when she had it. Like Klara, my grandmother had been stunning as a girl, and after she had married (and been unhappy with) my granddad, she had seen many less attractive women marry for money instead of love and profit greatly as a result. Hilda thought that women like my mother were naive, and had never gotten over my mother’s walking away from such great wealth to marry her son. My mother and Hilda were polar opposites, but in Klara, my grandmother found a willing protegée. So, by the time the leaves had fallen, Klara had completely replaced her old wardrobe with a new one, bought with the money she was earning, and these new clothes were a constant source of conflict between her and my mother. She had enough money to buy her own drinks now, too, so she went to the Hotel Kazin whenever she felt like it. The unexpected result of my father’s attempt to discipline her through work was that she acquired the means to do whatever she wanted. With Hilda’s encouragement, she became fiercely independent.

  As the arguments between Klara and my parents grew louder, I quietly gained some independence of my own. My dad bought me two little milk pails to carry over across the hill to Mrs. Backyard’s farm. The distance couldn’t have been more than five hundred meters, but it was as though I had discovered a whole new world outside my doorstep. Apart from the farm, which was a wonderful source of entertainment, I was quickly introduced to the local children, and it turned out that Mary Hairy and Petr Acorn were just the tip of the iceberg: Cernosice was crawling with baby-boom kids like me.

  Since I was a friendly and confident little girl, my natural instinct was to say hello to everyone, and it was only a matter of time before I knew the names of all the local boys and girls. As I carried my milk pails back and forth from the farm, I would always try to visit one of them. I would knock on their doors and ask their parents if they could come out and play, and while the children themselves were quite happy to see me, I began to realize that their parents were not.

  “Ah, you’re Furman’s little girl,” they would say. “Aren’t you a bit young to be knocking on our door?”

  “I don’t think so,” I would reply. “Is Petra home? Can she come out and play?”

  “Petra’s busy,” they would tell me. “You should probably go home.”

  The parents who discouraged their children from playing with me were the same parents who had discouraged their older children from playing with Klara when she was my age (and whose sons were presently falling over themselves to buy her drinks at the Rotten pub). But whereas Klara had become shy and withdrawn as a result, the disapproval only made me more determined. If Petra couldn’t play today, could she play tomorrow? I was forever asking, and as the Christmas season approached, more and more parents became wearily resigned to the sight of me playing in their yards with their children.

  Despite the initial resistance of their parents, I became quite good friends with Petr and Mary. The Acorn and Hairy families were next-door neighbors who lived two houses down the street from mine. Their villas had been converted into communal housing, but like most people in the region, they lived with their relatives instead of complete strangers. The Hairy house was occupied by the Hairys and the Caesars, Mr. Caesar being Mr. Hairy’s brother-in-law.

  Everyone in the street was afraid of Mr. Caesar. He was extremely fastidious when it came to noise and litter. He was one of the few neighbors who kept his house and garden in immaculate condition, but his fussiness also extended to the forest, where he could often be found dismantling local treehouses and forts on the grounds that they were unsafe. Barking dogs enraged him, and excessive snowball-throwing or shouting in the street would also drive him nuts. It was a well-known fact that if you made a lot of noise outside the Hairys’ villa on the weekends, Mr. Caesar would come out and chase you away. As far as the older kids in the neighborhood were concerned, playing cat and mouse with Mr. Caesar was even more fun than re-creating famous battles in the forest, but this was one game I would never join in. Deep down, I liked the way Mr. Ceasar kept his garden neat and tidy, and I longed for the day when our own house would be finished, because I secretly hoped it would look as nice as his.

  MY SISTER AND MY PARENTS declared a truce over Christmas, and Klara made the festive season the best one I had experienced so far by contributing a lot of food to my mother’s pantry and promising to stop lying on top of me when she came home from work. The Baby Jesus brought me a set of wax pencils and a Russian recording of Swan Lake, and we saw in the New Year by singing around the piano like old times and remembering Barry by watching him on TV.

  It was a perfect start to an important year in my life. I would be attending school for the first time that summer, but I was also old enough to audition for the National Ballet Preparatory School, and this audition had been on my mind ever since the day I had met Mr. Slavicky. After the Christmas show, Mrs. Sprislova had taken my mother aside and explained that while I was one of the most expressive dancers she had ever trained, my size was going to be a problem at the audition. And now that the February date was approaching, she seemed even more nervous than my mot
her and I.

  On the morning of the audition, my mother crisply ironed my best dress and put my hair up in pigtails. I was too nervous to eat, so I had a glass of milk for breakfast and checked my backpack several times for my leotard, legwarmers, and piskoty slippers. Then we stood outside the house and waited for my dad to return home from work. Just after sunrise, he rattled up our street, performed his famous three-point turn, and drove my mother and me back to Prague.

  “Good luck,” he winked as we hopped out of the car.

  I followed my mother through the big revolving door at the rear of the Federal Parliament building, and we walked into a crowded lobby. There must have been at least five hundred little girls applying for the preparatory school, and all of them seemed to be wearing dresses that you could only buy in Tuzex, an exclusive chain of shops that sold Western-brand products to the party elite or people who could get their hands on U.S. dollars or deutsche marks. The mothers wore fur coats and seemed even more glamorous than the well-to-do women whose daughters attended Mrs. Sprislova’s school. Everyone checked out my mother’s outfit and hat, before looking down at me and smiling with relief. I was easily the smallest girl, and I could tell that none of the women considered me a threat. I clutched my backpack and waited nervously in the crowd until Mrs. Saturday appeared at the head of the stairs.

  “Dobry den! Thank you very much for coming,” she announced. “We have a long day ahead of us. The way the selection process will work is that I’ll call everyone’s name in alphabetical order, forming groups of thirty that will audition together.”

  She began to read from a long list of names, and the girls she selected kissed their mothers good-bye and climbed the stairs like a flock of sacrificial lambs. Once the first group had been formed, the girls followed Mrs. Saturday down the hall, while the rest of us had to wait in the lobby until they finished. The wait was unbearable. After what seemed like an eternity, Mrs. Saturday reappeared and began to read more names from her list. I prayed that my name would be called because I wasn’t sure that my nerves would hold out. Fortunately, I was the last girl in group two, and my knees began to shake as I heard my name echo through the lobby. I let go of my mother’s hand and followed Mrs. Saturday to a small dressing room opposite one of the studios. The girls and I changed quickly and then were ushered across the hallway, walking past the five-person auditioning committee that sat at a long table at the front of the room. The studio was freezing cold, and we all warmed our backs against the radiators that lined the walls. The fat pianist I had seen in Mrs. Saturday’s class two years earlier strode into the room and sat behind her piano, while Mrs. Saturday divided us into three lines. I looked up as she passed me, hoping for a glimpse of recognition, but her face betrayed nothing and I felt sick with fear. Even though we were only five or six years old, everyone in the group knew that the school only accepted one student in ten, and each of us desperately wanted to be chosen.

  “Very well, we will begin!” Mrs. Saturday boomed. “We will examine you individually at first, so when we call your name, please step forward and let us take a good look at you.”

  One after the other, we stood in front of the committee and let Mrs. Saturday examine us like horses, measuring and testing the elasticity of our limbs, pushing our legs up as high as they would go. Whenever a girl was able to touch her forehead with her foot, the committee members would whisper to each other and nod approvingly. No one said a word as I was examined. I could hear the vertebrae cracking in my spine as Mrs. Saturday forced my legs up and down.

  When the individual examination was over, we were told to exercise at the bar. The pianist played a cheerful waltz, while Mrs. Saturday made us kick our legs in time, and while I kicked each leg as high as it would go, the bar was still slightly too high for me to reach, and it was obvious that the taller girls were doing a much better job. To make matters worse, I could see the reflection of the committee in the mirror, and none of the ladies were even looking in my direction. I felt like crying, but I gritted my teeth and persevered to the end.

  “Very well,” Mrs. Saturday said as the pianist finished her waltz with a flourish. “Now step out onto the floor and we will end the audition with five minutes of improvisation.”

  The girls scattered around the studio, splaying their feet into the fifth position and raising their arms like professional ballerinas. The pianist walked over to the record player in the corner of the room and was about to put the needle on the record.

  “Maybe not the Prokofiev this time,” Mrs. Saturday stopped her. “Could you please put on side two of the other record?”

  The pianist looked vaguely surprised and she removed the record from the turntable and replaced it with another.

  After a short pause, the urgent sound of an oboe warbled into the studio, and as soon as the first notes crackled from the speakers, my body was electrified. It was the final act of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra’s famous recording of Swan Lake. My heart heaved with emotion, and I stood up on my toes and took control of the space. While the other girls danced more or less on the spot, I began to dance through the studio in search of my prince. I knew every bar of this ballet by heart, but more important, I knew the story behind the music. In the last act of Swan Lake, Odette waits for her prince to arrive, knowing that if he doesn’t show up in time, she will turn back into a swan and die of a broken heart. In the populist version, the prince does arrive in time, but in the classic version, he is delayed, and Odette’s climaxing dance is filled with desperation. As Mrs. Saturday and the committee looked on in amazement, I re-created this desperation, dancing frantically across the room from the window to the door and listening for the sound of Mr. Slavicky’s steps. The music thundered and roiled like a stormy sea as I searched every corner of the room for my prince, knowing all too well that if I couldn’t find him, I was doomed to turn back into a swan.

  When the music stopped, I opened my eyes to see the whole class staring at me. One of the girls actually giggled with embarrassment, until Mrs. Saturday cleared her throat loudly. She walked across the room to the auditioning committee, and after a hushed conference, she clapped her hands.

  “Would you ladies please step back against the wall?” she said, indicating the majority of the girls. Then she looked directly at me. “We’ll try that again and give you a little bit more space,” she told me. “Just try to relax and let it come, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said nervously.

  The other girls moved back, glaring daggers at me as Mrs. Saturday instructed the pianist to replay the record, and for the next five minutes I danced as though my life depended upon it, letting the music carry me through the room. I searched for my prince and was heartbroken by his absence, and before I knew it, the audition was over.

  “Thank you very much, ladies—that will be all,” Mrs. Saturday announced. “We’ll notify you of our decision at the end of the school year.”

  The class left the studio and returned to the dressing room. As I passed Mrs. Saturday, I felt her hand briefly brush against my shoulder, but when I looked up, her face was as impassive as ever. I’ll never know for sure, because I never had the courage to ask, but I’ve always believed that Mrs. Saturday deliberately changed the record to give me a chance in the audition. The committee hadn’t even looked at me when I first entered the room, but as I left, I could feel their eyes burning into my back.

  I changed out of my leotard and slippers in a daze, and hurried down to the lobby.

  “How did it go?” my mother asked.

  “I think I got in!” I whispered excitedly. “Mrs. Saturday played the final act of Swan Lake, and she asked me to dance Odette by myself in front of the committee!”

  “Really?” she said. “That sounds promising. I guess sending you to Mrs. Sprislova’s school must have really paid off.”

  “I hope so,” I told her. “All the other girls were so much taller than me. And they had proper leotards and everything.”

  “We’ll buy you a
proper leotard, don’t worry,” my mother sighed. “But in the meantime, how about I take you down to the Florenc bus station and we can have lunch with Klara at the buffet?”

  “That would be great!”

  Now that my nerves had settled, I discovered that I was terribly hungry. When we arrived at the station, we joined a large crowd of customers and waited to be served. I couldn’t help noticing that most of the customers were men.

  “Klara’s going to be very surprised when she sees us!” I said.

  My mother smiled as we worked our way through the crowd, and then her smile suddenly vanished. Hilda’s buffet was fronted by a large glass counter, and while the counter contained an eye-catching array of little cakes and sausages, the main attraction appeared to be my sister’s breasts. Klara stood behind the counter in a low-cut stretch T-shirt, and she had taken off her bra underneath it. Most of the customers appeared to know her by name, and whenever they placed an order, Klara would lean revealingly forward as she scooped up their purchases and poured them their drinks. The men watched her in amazement, and after Hilda had rung up an arbitrary total on the cash register (the prices were written illegibly in chalk, so she cheerfully charged whatever she liked), the men would round the bill up to the nearest five or ten crowns and give it to Klara as a tip. Judging by the size of the crowd and the amount of money changing hands, my grandmother and sister were making a small fortune.

  Klara continued to lean forward and smile at the men until she met my mother’s eyes across the counter. She leaped in the air as though a wasp had stung her.

  “Mum!” she gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Dominika had her dancing audition today,” my mother said coolly. “We thought we’d celebrate by visiting you.”