AS A LITTLE GIRL, I believed in Heaven and Hell, because the Baby Jesus gave me presents every Christmas, and the devil came to our house every fifth of December. I was very afraid of the devil. His name was Cert (pronounced churt), and he accompanied Saint Mikulas as the latter passed through the town. Saint Mikulas had a fluffy white beard and wore a bishop’s miter on his head. Every December, he would walk through Cernosice seeking out the girls and boys who had been good for the year, assisted by an angel who carried a basket of sweets. Whenever they visited our house, they would come inside and ask my parents if I had done my homework and been respectful to my teachers, but they would always leave the door open and Cert would sneak in. His face was painted black, and big red horns stuck out of his head. He rattled a chain and made terrible noises as he ran through the house. Every year, my parents would help me find a good place to hide, but no matter where I hid, the devil would find me. He would pick me up and carry me to the living room, and then he would laugh horribly and beg Saint Mikulas to let him take me down to Hell. Saint Mikulas would consider this very seriously. He had a big book with everyone’s name written in it, and my heart would leap into my throat as he looked up my behavior. So far, I’d been good. Saint Mikulas would grunt approvingly and tell Cert that he would have to take some other boy or girl this year, and Cert would become so wild with anger my mother would have to fetch him a drink to calm him down. Saint Mikulas would pull some gingerbread from his sack and the angel would give me some sweets from her basket, and then they would take Cert outside and tell him off for sneaking into our house. He never listened to them, though. As long as they kept leaving the door open, he kept sneaking inside. All I could do was be on my best behavior and hope that some other kid in town was worse than me.
MRS. JANDOVA LED ME INSIDE the Cernosice church, and we sat down in a stall next to Terezka. There were quite a few children in the stalls around us, and they were very quiet and looked up from their prayer books when I whispered hello. I wanted to ask many questions, but Mrs. Jandova nudged me with her elbow.
“We have to pray now!” she whispered, kneeling down onto a prayer cushion she produced from her bag. She clasped her hands together and moved her lips in silent prayer.
I lowered my bare knees onto the floor and tried to pray. I hadn’t seen the little god since we sold our cottage in Semily, but whenever I was sad or lonely, I talked to him inside my head. I had never officially prayed to him though, and I didn’t know any prayers. But I had a good imagination. The flame of the eternal light flickered above me and the pipes of the organ sighed from the balcony. I closed my eyes:
Hello, my little god,
I know you are very good and wise.
How are you up there in Heaven?
I’m sure it must be much better than here in Cernosice.
Down here, we have a broken house and I have nobody to play with.
And I am very worried about my father.
He works too hard and smokes too many cigarettes.
Could you do something nice for him? Please please please?
Thank you. Amen.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” intoned a voice from the front of the church. I looked up and saw a young man in a black cassock standing next to the pulpit. It was the town priest who had recently been transferred from Prague, and no one was quite sure what to make of him.
“Amen!” the children replied.
The priest laid his Bible on the pulpit. He licked his finger and thumbed through the pages.
“Blessed are they who were persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven,” he said.
The priest was a short fellow with chubby cheeks and a shiny, buttonlike nose. He didn’t look very much like a priest to me, because he had modern glasses with metallic frames and wore a pair of corduroy trousers beneath his cassock. He seemed like a nice man, and I liked him immediately.
“Today, I would like to say a few words about the famous martyrs of the Catholic Church,” he announced.
“Amen!” I said loudly. The children in the stalls turned to look at me, and Mrs. Jandova nudged me with her prayer book. But the priest’s eyes crinkled with amusement.
“Hello, young lady,” he smiled. “I haven’t seen you before. Perhaps you can tell me the name of the most famous Czech martyr?”
I didn’t have to think for more than a second. I knew the answer. It was one of the first things my mother had taught me.
“Jan Hus!” I said confidently.
Mrs. Jandova let out a soft wheeze. Even the priest looked vaguely alarmed.
“I’ve seen his statue in the Old Town Square,” I continued. “My mother said he was a famous priest who was burned at the stake because he believed that the Church should be poor!”
I looked at the priest with a hopeful smile, but his cheeks had turned red and he burst into a peal of nervous laughter. Then he cleared his throat, pulled a handkerchief from his cassock, and began to wipe his glasses.
“Dear me,” he said carefully. “You’re not right, but you’re not wrong either. Jan Hus is a very famous Czech martyr. He was condemned to death in 1415 for preaching against the Catholic Church. He was burned at the stake and was never officially proclaimed a saint, but I believe he was a good man and a hero of the Czech nation.”
He finished wiping his glasses and put them back on.
“But it’s another Jan I’m referring to,” he continued, this time addressing the whole congregation. “Our holy Saint Jan, who was recognized by the pope as the most famous Czech martyr.” And then he launched into a talk about the other Saint Jan—Jan Nepomucky—the most famous martyr of the Catholic Church on account of the fact that it wasn’t the Catholics who killed him.
Once the communion workshop was over, the children ran outside to meet their parents. Mrs. Jandova went to have a word with the priest, while Terezka and I walked through the church, looking up at the paintings depicting the Stations of the Cross.
After a while, Mrs. Jandova and the priest emerged from the rectory. The priest had changed out of his cassock and into a timeworn brown jacket that matched his corduroy pants.
“So this is the famous Dominika!” he smiled. “Mrs. Jandova tells me you love to talk.”
“Not all the time,” I said seriously. “Sometimes I like to listen, too!”
“I see,” the priest nodded. “And you know your Czech history, which is very impressive. Tell me, have I met your mother and father? Are they churchgoing folk?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “My dad is off looking for work all the time, and my mother writes books about the Russian economy.”
“Very well,” the priest nodded.
“But my granddad is buried here!” I said. “And I have no one to play with, so I have plenty of time to come to church. I even have a pillow I can bring to kneel on.”
Mrs. Jandova and the priest exchanged glances. The expression on Mrs. Jandova’s face was that of someone realizing the full consequences of a bad idea that had probably seemed like a good one at the time.
“You would be very welcome, of course,” the priest chuckled. “The Sunday service starts at ten in the morning, and I do hope to see you in the congregation. God bless you until then.”
THE SMILING PRIEST made such a good impression, I decided to go to church every Sunday. I gave up my morning TV show, Studio Friend, and made sure that my favorite purple dress was washed and ironed in time for the service.
Terezka and her grandmother waited for me in front of their house, and we walked down the hill to church together. Old Mrs. Jandova became my custodian in all matters religious. She sat next to me in the stalls and told me when to stand and when to kneel. I was surprised that she had become so fond of me, until Terezka confessed that her grandmother was very eager to oversee my embrace of the Catholic faith. She read the Bible the way some people read cookbooks, pouring over its recipes for the best tips on how to get to Heaven, and s
he was very intrigued by a passage in which Jesus had declared that a single sinner turned into a good Christian was worth more than ninety-nine righteous souls. After my first communion, she gave me a silver necklace with a medallion of the Holy Mary on it, and arranged for me to sing in the choir. I was also a regular guest in the rectory, where I would tell Father Eugene about my adventures at school.
Father Eugene listened patiently, sympathizing with my battle against Mrs. Vincentova and the long hours I spent practicing my battement tendu at ballet, and then he would get me to blow out the candles and help him collect the hymn books from the stalls.
“Just out of interest,” he asked one afternoon. “What’s your confirmation name?”
“My confirmation name?” I was completely puzzled.
“When you were baptized, your godfather or godmother would have given you an additional name,” he explained. “You’re probably too young to remember, but ask your parents about it.”
He made a little cross on my forehead and sent me on my way.
I walked out into the street, where the sound of laughter echoed from the Under the Forest pub, and two stray dogs sniffed each other’s bums in front of the War Memorial. There weren’t any children around, so I opened the gate to the little cemetery and went to visit my grandfather Emil, who had died before I was born. My grandfather’s grave was in the corner of the cemetery. He didn’t have a single plot with a headstone, but was lodged in a kind of tower block for dead people. He had a small window in a six-foot wall of small windows, and I had to stand on my tiptoes to see inside. His cubicle was one foot high and two feet deep, and was dominated by a large photo of my grandmother Hilda in an imitation ivory frame. Once or twice a year, she would dress in black and get my father to drive her to the cemetery. Weeping bitterly, she would open Emil’s window with a key she wore around her neck and push some more plastic flowers inside. Then she would kiss a small photo of my grandfather and slide it back behind her own. My dad would follow behind as she dramatically crossed the yard, her heaving bosom conveying unspeakable grief to the other widows tending their husbands’ graves.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Jandova called out across the boxwood trees. She was on her knees, weeding the ground in front of a black headstone covered with ivy.
“Hello, Mrs. Jandova! Can I help you?” I asked.
“Oh, no thank you,” she refused. “I need the exercise.”
“Well, at least I could bring you some water,” I offered, grabbing the handle of her watering can.
“There’s really no need,” she protested. “I’ve watered everything already.”
I put the watering can back down and sat on top of it. Mrs. Jandova continued to pull dandelions out of the gravel.
“Your grave is much nicer than our grave,” I said sadly. “My grandfather is over in that window down there, but I can’t make it look nice because I don’t have the key.”
I put my hands in my lap and sighed.
“Listen,” Mrs. Jandova said kindly. “If you go to the other side of the church, you’ll find the grave of a little French baby whose parents returned to France after the war. It’s covered in nettles and briars and could use a bit of work.”
The headstone was buried beneath a tangle of weeds, and pieces of shattered plaque were scattered around the site. I had to reassemble them in order to learn the girl’s name. A photo of a baby emerged from a thick layer of dirt as I wiped the plaque with my sleeve. There were two inscriptions. The first was an epitaph, “Et Rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses: l’espace d’un matin,” and the second the baby’s name and dates, “Renée Rose Rouelle, 30 Août 1933-7 Mars 1934.” I counted the years on my fingers. The baby had died forty-one years before I was born. I imagined that she was looking down at me from Heaven, and I waved to her up in the sky.
“Hello, little Rose!” I said. “Don’t you worry about your grave. I am going to take care of it from now on. I will fix the plaque on your headstone and plant you some yellow roses.”
I worked in the cemetery until it started to get dark, trimming the bushes with Mrs. Jandova’s shears and removing nettles and weeds until my hands were red and itchy. Then I said good-bye to Rose and zigzagged my way up the narrow lane that twisted and turned around the neighborhood gardens, and could hear my mother calling my name across the valley. As I crested the hill, I caught sight of a lean silhouette holding a greyhound on a leash.
“Hello, Mr. Kraus!” I called out.
Jan Kraus was the subject of even more gossip than the priest. He was the black sheep brother of Ivan and Hugo Kraus, who wielded as much local power as the Communist officials. They were handymen who maintained a network of fellow handymen through regular church services and nights of drinking, and were the people you turned to if your car broke down or your stove needed fixing. The Communist handymen in the region were so bad, even the highest-ranking party officials hated using them, so the Krauses were a valuable resource in Cernosice. The Under the Forest pub was their domain, and their religious status gave them a moral exemption from any Communist activity they didn’t wish to participate in. They were untouchable. But they were also rather humorless.
The man with the greyhound was different. He was the well-educated middle son, nicknamed “The Philosopher,” because he took great delight in tangling his brothers up in the many contradictions of the Church. He did the same thing with the Communists, and was only tolerated in Cernosice because he was young and handsome, and because no one was sure how much influence he had within his family.
“Hello, Dominika,” he said pleasantly. “You’re out late this evening. What have you been up to?”
I told him about the French baby’s grave, and how I intended to plant yellow roses around it. I also showed him my battements tendus and passés and frappés until he laughed and pointed out that my mother was still calling me home for dinner.
I liked Jan Kraus very much. He was one of the few people in our street who talked to me without the slightest hint of prejudice.
After dinner that night, my mother soaked me in a hot bath and scrubbed the dirt off my hands. I told her about the Baby Rose and the talk I had with Father Eugene.
“What’s my confirmation name?” I asked as she rubbed shampoo into my hair.
“You don’t have one,” my mother said. “You were never baptized.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“We wanted to give you the choice,” she replied. “If you decide you want to be baptized, you still can. It’s your decision. Your sister decided she didn’t want to be religious, so she isn’t. At the end of the day, what you believe is up to you.”
“I believe in my little god,” I told her. “But I haven’t seen him since we sold our cottage. I’d be very sad if he’s gone away.”
“If you believe in him, he’ll never go away,” my mother reassured me. “He’ll always be with you, no matter where you are. Now, deep breath—” and she pushed my head under the water.
The following Sunday after Mass, I went straight to Rose’s grave, carrying a bucket of cement powder and sand from our construction site. I poured water into the bucket and made mortar, which I smeared onto the headstone with a spatula. Then I reassembled the shattered pieces of the porcelain plaque, tapping them into place with the handle of a hammer. I gave the headstone a good splash with water and wiped it clean with my old pajamas. Rose’s grave looked very nice. I could hear someone raking gravel at the back of the church, and I thought it might be Mrs. Jandova or even Father Eugene. I picked up my bucket and skipped around the corner, eager to show someone the good work I had done.
It took me a few moments to locate the source of the noise, because the man doing the raking was on his hands and knees. His head was down and his bum was in the air, and he was meticulously cleaning the white gravel that covered one of the plots. I was about to say hello, when I recognized my neighbor Mr. Caesar’s green football socks and jersey. Mr. Caesar didn’t go to church. He pla
yed soccer on Sundays instead, with the Cernosice team, and must have dropped by the cemetery on his way to a game. I tiptoed back around the side of the church and was about to sneak home, when the rectory door opened and Father Eugene stepped out.
“Hello, was that you I could hear tapping a few minutes ago?” he asked. “I thought we had a woodpecker in the trees!”
He pulled his cassock above his knees and crossed the patch of deep grass at the side of the church.
“I’ve cleaned the Baby Rose’s grave,” I said proudly. “Her parents went back to France after the war, so she’s all alone. I’m going to plant yellow roses and water them every day.”
Father Eugene knelt down to read the inscription on the stone. “Renée Rose Rouelle,” he said. “That’s a very pretty name. Very French.”
“And guess what?” I told him. “You know, my confirmation name? I don’t have one. I was never baptized.”
“Really?” Father Eugene frowned. “But wait a minute . . . you’re confirmed. You’ve taken communion.”
“My mother says that if you’re going to believe in something, it’s pretty silly unless you’re given a choice,” I explained.
“Right, but you’ve taken communion. You’ve eaten the body of Christ,” he said in a serious voice I hadn’t heard before. “You’re not allowed to do that unless you’ve been baptized.”
“But I can get baptized!” I told him excitedly. “All I have to do is make up my mind.”
“No, no, it’s a sin for an unbaptized person to take Holy Communion,” he said. “It goes against the laws of the Church. Are you quite sure about this?”
The Twelve Little Cakes Page 26