The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  We drove down to the local health-care center, which was one of the nicest buildings in Cernosice. It had once belonged to a famous Czech actor, but now housed an assortment of local doctors and dentists. Dr. Polakova’s office was on the ground floor, and my father carried me through a waiting room crowded with mothers and children. We went straight in to see the doctor, a nice old lady who knew the senior staff at many of the big hospitals in Prague. She did what she always did, which was take my temperature and weigh me.

  “Thirty nine and a half.” She frowned at the thermometer. “That’s very high. Can you put her on the scale for me?”

  My dad transferred me to the old-fashioned scale that stood in the corner of the room.

  “Eighteen kilos,” Dr. Polakova muttered. “That’s very low. And she has bad diarrhea, you say? What do you think we should do?”

  “Can you refer her to someone at the Bulovka Hospital?” my mother asked. “Is there anyone there who might be able to help?”

  Dr. Polakova opened her desk drawer and scratched her head thoughtfully.

  “Jiri Kopecky owes me a favor,” she said. “His assistant is Dr. Bartos. I’ll write you a referral and give them a call while you drive there. How does that sound?”

  She scribbled a referral while my mother wrapped me back up, and a few minutes later we were driving frantically to the Bulovka Hospital.

  My father took the direct route through Prague, using all of his taxi-driving skills to pilot us through the narrow streets of the Jewish Quarter. We drove up the quay past the Manes Bridge, and then my dad suddenly jammed on his brakes. An old man with a nylon bag in his hand was standing near a pedestrian crossing. My father excitedly wound down his window.

  “Lada Stern!” he called out. “The STB have fired me again. I’ve been trying to contact you all week.”

  The old man turned around and his face lit up.

  “Jarda Furman! Ahoj!” he called back. “You’re not going to believe this. I just found Kriegel’s ashes! They were in the toilet at the Central Railway Station!” He held up the nylon bag.

  “You’re kidding!” my dad exclaimed. “Are you heading home?”

  The man nodded and my father swung open the passenger door.

  “We’re driving to the Bulovka Hospital. Dominika has come down with something nasty, so we’re in a hurry. But I’ll drop you off on the way if you like.”

  Mr. Stern was at least twenty years older than my dad. He was short and stocky and his skin was wrinkled and gray, but his deep-set blue eyes radiated an almost ethereal calm. Mr. Stern and his wife had been part of the Czech resistance during the Second World War, and had spent many years in German concentration camps. They were dissidents, like my parents, and close friends of future Czech president Vaclav Havel. In 1984, Mrs. Sternova would become the official spokeswoman for Charta 77, Havel’s protest group, and the secret police would routinely interrogate her in the old Gestapo headquarters in the middle of Prague, where she had been tortured by the Nazis four decades earlier.

  Mr. Stern climbed into the car and put the bag between his knees.

  “Hello, Dominika. You’re not looking so good,” he said kindly.

  “Hello, Mr. Stern. I don’t feel so good, either,” I whispered.

  He patted my hair with his big hand and began to tell my parents the story of how he came to find the ashes of one of the greatest Czech patriots in a public toilet at the Central Railway Station.

  FRANTISEK KRIEGEL was a doctor who worked with Mr. Stern in the resistance and later became a member of parliament during the Prague Spring. When the Russians invaded in 1968, all the important Czech politicians were arrested and flown to Moscow, where they were presented with the normalization agreement that authorized the Soviet Union to take control of Czechoslovakia. Fearing for their lives, nineteen men signed the agreement. The only man who didn’t sign was Kriegel. He said no to General Secretary Brezhnev, expecting that the Russians would probably shoot him. To everyone’s surprise, they allowed him to return to Prague, where he was quietly and systematically hounded to death by Czech collaborators. He was fired from his job, interrogated regularly by the STB, and denied medical treatment until he died of a heart attack in 1979. Even after his death, the secret police didn’t leave him alone. First they tried to ban his funeral, and when it was reluctantly approved, a group of agents rode their motorcycles to the cemetery and revved their engines loudly in the street to disrupt the service. A few days later, they stole his urn from the cemetery and erased his name from the tombstone in much the same way that they would erase it from the history books. By 1981, few Czech people even knew that Mr. Kriegel had existed. The cremation urn that sat on Mr. Stern’s knees was symbolic of the way our country could so easily dispose of its bad conscience.

  “It took me a year and half,” Mr. Stern said grimly. “I kept plugging away at the Ministry of Interior until I received an anonymous phone call yesterday, advising me to check the toilets in the major railway stations. I had to go to five different stations before I found his ashes.”

  “Jezis Marja!” My father shook his head. “Those guys are such ass-holes! They’ve got a new rule that says all taxi drivers have to work as informers. It’s getting ridiculous. I’m at the point where I’m thinking I might as well sign the Charta. I’ve got nothing to lose!”

  Charta 77 was a human rights document drafted by Vaclav Havel and Pavel Kohout, demanding that the Communist government respect the basic laws of the Geneva Convention. By signing it, my father would add his name to Radio Free Europe’s official list of dissidents, which would make the secret police focus on his activities even more than before.

  Mr. Stern turned to look at me in the backseat of the car, wrapped up in a blanket and shivering in my mother’s arms.

  “Don’t be silly, Jarda. You have a lot to lose,” he said quietly.

  THE BULOVKA HOSPITAL was on top of a hill that overlooked the Vltava River. When we finally arrived, my father rolled down his window and presented our referral to the guard at the gate. The man waved us in and we drove up to the emergency room, which was a dilapidated building surrounded by a fleet of rusty ambulances. We trooped into the building and asked a nurse to help us find Dr. Bartos. It turned out that he had just left for the day, so I was examined by an overworked intern instead. The young doctor was very tired. He suppressed his yawns as he prodded my belly, and when a nurse handed him the result of my blood tests, he looked them over and sighed. He told the nurse to make him a strong coffee, and called my parents into the room.

  “Your daughter has dysentery,” he said flatly. “How she managed to catch it, I don’t want to know. Technically speaking, it doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “It doesn’t exist?” my father growled.

  “Not under the Socialist Health Care System,” the doctor explained. “We cured it years ago. It’s one of the diseases our five-year plans have officially wiped out.”

  “But that’s terrible!” my mother cried. “What can we do?”

  “You can’t do anything,” the young doctor told her. “It doesn’t exist. The fact that there’s a ward full of Gypsy kids crawling with it down in the Infection Pavilion is beside the point. If I take your daughter down there, she will simply become unclassifiable until she gets better. That’s the way it works with diseases we’ve already officially cured.”

  “The Infection Pavilion?” my father said anxiously.

  “It’s a bunch of isolation wards that specialize in contagious diseases,” the doctor said. “They’ll put your daughter on an IV and shoot her full of drugs for a couple of weeks. It won’t be pleasant, but you should have brought her to us earlier. People die from dysentery, you know.”

  The blood drained from my mother’s face.

  “How long will she have to stay there?” she asked.

  “Two weeks, a month,” the doctor shrugged. “No solids, lots of fluids, and lots of rest.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I whispered. �
�I want to go home.”

  “Does a Dr. Kopecky work in these isolation wards?” my mother wanted to know.

  “Yes, he’s the head of the unit,” the intern replied. At the mention of Dr. Kopecky’s name, he suddenly became a lot more attentive.

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” he asked.

  “Dominika,” my mother told him.

  “Well, Dominika,” he said more cheerfully. “Let’s find you a bed and get your treatment underway. We’ll give you some medicine and I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I said miserably.

  The doctor called a nurse over and asked her to prepare some paperwork for my father, and then he picked me up and carried me to the elevator at the rear of the emergency room. I tried to protest, but I was too weak to cry. The best I could do was wave sadly at my parents, who looked very worried.

  “Visiting hours are on Wednesdays and Sundays,” the doctor told them. “And don’t worry. The pavilion is mostly made up of pediatric wards, so the nurses down there are very good with children.”

  THE INFECTION PAVILION was at the bottom of the hospital. It was built into the side of the hill and looked like a big concrete bunker. The doctor carried me out of the main building and through the hospital gardens, and his mood seemed to change as he approached the pavilion. He walked through the front door and carried me downstairs.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said to the admissions nurse. “I’ve got a white kid here with dysentery.”

  “Dysentery? You’re kidding!” the nurse said.

  “No,” the doctor sighed. “Is Dr. Kopecky here?”

  “He’s on a break,” the nurse said. “Take her down to the Gypsy Ward and I’ll let one of the nurses know you’re coming.”

  She buzzed us through the door and the doctor carried me down a long corridor to the dysentery ward. The doctor lowered me onto a bed and a nurse removed my clothes and sealed them in a plastic bag. She took the bag away, presumably to burn it, and then wheeled in an IV drip, which she attempted to insert. She jabbed me repeatedly with a needle, trying to find my artery. I whimpered with pain.

  “She’s got arms like matchsticks,” the nurse grumbled.

  She pulled the IV out of my arm and tried again and again.

  “Try the other arm, Magda,” the doctor suggested.

  He gave me a vitamin B shot as Nurse Magda finally found an artery and hooked my left arm up to the IV drip.

  “Turn her over,” the doctor ordered, and Nurse Magda flipped me onto my belly. The next thing I knew, the doctor was using my bum as a pincushion, jabbing it quickly with a variety of needles. He then got the nurse to flip me back over and tapped my tummy with a little hammer. I cried out with pain and he looked satisfied. He put the hammer back in his coat pocket, and Nurse Magda put a bag of ice on my tummy. And that was it. They covered me with a sheet and hurried out of the ward.

  Yellow bruises covered my arms, and as the ice in the bag began to melt, the sheet soaked through and started to freeze to my body. It was awful. I didn’t think I’d survive the ordeal, but the doctor must have given me something powerful, because I was asleep before I knew it. I drifted off for what seemed like a couple of minutes, but it was dark when I awoke and the hospital was silent. I opened my eyes and looked around the ward. A lamp on the observation deck outside the window cast a bleak light inside the room, and I could hear a faint rustling near the foot of my bed. A trickle of sweat ran down my spine. I tried to sit up and the rustling grew louder. Suddenly, a pair of black eyes snapped open beside me.

  “Hello,” the eyes said. “What’s your name?”

  “My name?” I cried out. “Who are you?”

  “Shhh,” the voice whispered. “You don’t want to let Nurse Magda catch you talking.”

  “You’ve been asleep for three days,” another voice said. “We thought you were never going to wake up.”

  “Three days?” I gasped. “But I was supposed to go to school on Monday!”

  I hoisted myself up on my elbows and someone slid a pillow behind my neck. When I finally was able to sit up properly, I found myself surrounded by four more pairs of eyes.

  “You’re not going anywhere if they don’t want you to,” they whispered. “There isn’t even a handle on the door.”

  I had to bite my lips to stop them from trembling.

  “My name is Dominika,” I said.

  “I am Zoltan,” the first voice replied. “This is Lucie, Mirka, Erika, and Gejza. We’ve all got tummy bugs, like you.”

  I could tell they were Gypsies, because they spoke with a Gypsy accent. Their eyes were huge, and blacker than the night, and they wore filthy pajamas with buttons missing. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out their faces. Behind them, near the wall, two toddlers stared at me through the bars of their cots.

  “What kind of tummy bugs?” I asked. “I’ve got dysentery.”

  “I’ve got dysentery, too,” Zoltan said.

  “Me, too,” whispered Mirka

  “So do we,” said Erika and Lucie.

  “I don’t,” Gejza declared proudly. “I have typhus.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s just like dysentery,” Zoltan said. “He’s just showing off.”

  Heavy steps echoed in the corridor and the lights snapped on in the ward next to ours. The Gypsy kids scurried back to their beds, and through the big glass window, I could see Nurse Magda shaking a young boy awake. She rolled him over, pulled his pants down, and smeared his thigh with a yellow liquid. Then she jabbed him with a needle. The boy immediately started to cry, but Nurse Magda said something that made him stop. Then she pulled his pants back up and switched off the lights.

  As soon as the slap of her footsteps died away, the Gypsy kids reappeared at my bedside.

  “That was Magda. She’s nasty,” Lucie whispered. “She hits you if she catches you talking after dark.”

  I was horrified at the prospect of being hit by Magda. Her work with the IV had been punishment enough.

  “What about the other wards?” I asked. “Are they allowed to talk?”

  “We don’t know,” Lucie replied. “We can see them, but we can’t hear them.”

  “And they’re allowed to eat,” Erika added.

  “What? We’re not allowed to eat?” I cried.

  “Shhh,” Zoltan whispered. “Eating just makes you shit harder, you know?”

  “Measles, mumps, and smallpox get biscuits and fruit,” Lucie said miserably. “Jaundice are allowed to have sugar in their tea, and the kids with heavy colds get whatever they want.”

  “Well, what do we get?” I asked.

  “Black tea and dry rolls,” Lucie and Erika said together.

  “That’s it?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “The nurses don’t like to come in here much,” Erika shrugged.

  “I don’t think they like us,” Mirka whispered.

  I lay down and pulled the sheet over my face, listening to the Gypsies as they returned to their beds. The room became quiet, except for the toddlers crying near the wall. They must have just soiled their nappies, because a terrible smell wafted across the room. No wonder the nurses didn’t like to come in. I blocked my nostrils with my fingers and tried to fall asleep, thinking about my nice purple dress and how I had missed the beginning of school.

  The following morning, a row of lights snapped on across the ceiling, one after the other, like falling dominos. I sat up and looked around. Through the big glass window at the side of our room, I could see a pretty young nurse distributing pills and thermometers to children in the other wards. She seemed much nicer than Nurse Magda. She smiled and even patted one or two of the children on their heads. Behind her, an even younger nurse with glasses pushed a tea trolley through the room, filling chipped enamel mugs with a steaming liquid. I noticed that many of the kids were reluctant to drink, but the pretty nurse made sure that they did
.

  “The nurses are bringing something to drink,” I called out to Zoltan. “It looks like the other kids hate it.”

  “Oh, no!” Zoltan groaned. “Nurse Zdena’s coming! She’s going to make us drink the vitakava!”

  “Dzungalo! Vitakava is disgusting!” said Gejza, sticking his tongue out for effect.

  “Is that malt coffee?” I asked worriedly. “My mum always makes me drink malt coffee when I’m sick.”

  “Yeah,” Zoltan said grimly. “Nurse Zdena says vitakava is better for us than black tea. She makes us drink it three times a week, even though it makes us shit like crazy.”

  “Can’t we just say we don’t want any?”

  “We’ve all tried,” Zoltan said. “Nurse Zdena says we have to put on more weight before the doctors will let us go home.”

  The key turned in the lock and the two nurses wheeled their trolley inside our room.

  “Good morning, children!” they said cheerfully.

  Nurse Zdena made a circuit of the room, handing thermometers to the Gypsy kids, along with little cups of charcoal tablets. As she walked past my bed, she saw that my eyes were open.

  “Hello there!” she smiled. “Welcome back!”

  “Hello,” I said nervously. “Can I go home now?”

  Nurse Zdena laughed good-humoredly and slid the thermometer under my armpit.

  “It’s not up to me, my dear,” she said. “First we have to make sure that your tummy bugs have gone.”

  “But I feel much better!” I said. “Really! I think I’m well again!”

  “That’s for the doctors to decide,” Nurse Zdena smiled. “In the meantime, here’s a nice cup of malt coffee!”

  “I’m not very thirsty,” I said in a small voice.

  The young nurse filled a cup with vitakava, and Nurse Zdena brought it over with a stern expression on her face.