We continued up the road to the forest, but I had to keep stopping because Lisa ate everything around her. She ate weeds and thistles, and even started to nibble at a bag of cement that was sitting outside Mr. Acorn’s garage. Once she decided to eat something, it was very hard to make her stop, and I was completely exhausted by the time we reached my house. Taking Barry for a walk was much easier. I led Lisa around the side fence and tied her to the generator at the top of our garden. My father’s recent attempts to find a job had been thwarted, so he was working by himself in the yard, laying the cement foundation of what would later become a large retaining wall. Many empty Pilsner bottles sat on top of the generator, along with a pack of Spartas and his beloved Lucky Strikes.
“You’re back,” my mother greeted me as she came out into the yard. “Did they let you ride the pony?”
“The pony wasn’t there, so I took a goat instead,” I told her. “She’s a very nice goat and I’ve brought her home to meet you.”
I pointed to Lisa, who was sniffing around the generator.
“You took a goat? Does Mrs. Backyard know you have her?”
“Yes,” I lied. “And next week, I’ll definitely have the pony. But see how happy Lisa is in our garden? She really likes it here! There’s plenty of room, and a pony is really only a little tiny bit bigger than a goat, so there’s not much difference, and I was thinking—”
A look of horror appeared on my mother’s face. And when I turned to see what she was staring at, I was confronted by the most terrifying sight in the world: Lisa the goat had her head above the generator and was eating my dad’s Lucky Strike cigarettes!
“Nooooo!” my mother and I screamed in unison.
We ran across the yard, but it was too late. Lisa had chewed her way through the whole pack, and had wisps of tobacco all through her beard. She smiled and stamped her hoof with pleasure.
“Jezis Marja!” my mother gasped.
“Goats aren’t supposed to eat cigarettes!” I wailed. “Oh, Lisa, you bad goat! You naughty goat! My dad is going to be so angry with you! It’s not my fault, Mum! Really!”
My mother salvaged the pack of Spartas, knowing that this would be small consolation.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be here when he finds out.”
“It was an accident!” I cried. “You have to tell Dad it wasn’t my fault! I only brought Lisa because Dana Bukova and Helenka Vesela came and took Nikina early to stop me from riding her. Mrs. Novotna says it’s time for me to behave like a real girl, but none of the girls in my class want to let me. I really am trying very hard.”
“I know you are, sweetie,” my mother sighed. “Take the goat back to Mrs. Backyard, and I’ll have a word with your father.”
“I hope so,” I said ruefully.
I dragged Lisa away from the generator and hurried around the house. There was no point in going to the forest. I had fed Lisa the most expensive snack in Cernosice, and I was going to get in lots of trouble. My heart sank as we walked back across the hill. I secretly knew that we would never get a pony, the same way I knew that I was not the kind of girl who would ever end up on a farm. My reality was different. I was clever and I tried very hard, but this seemed to count against me for some reason. My sister didn’t seem to try (even though she was clever), yet people seemed to like her, especially the boys. My mother often said that these things would sort themselves out when I got older, but it wasn’t much comfort now. Lisa and I were halfway to the lane when the town’s public address system came to life.
“Prosim! Pozor!” a voice crackled across the valley. “This is an urgent message for Comrade Lojda! We have an electrical fault in the stationmaster’s fuse box. Comrade Lojda! Can you report to the National Committee right away?”
A long burst of marching band music concluded the message.
Lisa and I continued down the road, and were just about to turn into the lane when Mrs. Fejfarova’s gate flew open and Mr. Fix-it hurried out to his car. Mrs. Fejfarova was a widow who lived in a tiny cottage at the end of our street. Her plumbing and heating must have been really bad, because a lot of work seemed to go on at her house and Mr. Fix-it was a regular. He walked over to his rusty Skoda, but instead of driving to the National Committee building as requested, he leaned against the door and leisurely lit a cigarette.
“Hello, Mr. Lojda!” I called out as I led Lisa past him. “Would you like to pat my goat?”
Mr. Fix-it’s eyes twinkled. “No,” he replied. “But I’d pay a thousand crowns to pat your sister’s.”
He drew on his cigarette and smiled mysteriously.
“My sister doesn’t have a goat,” I said. “The only person who has a goat is Mrs. Backyard.”
Mr. Fix-it laughed and opened his car door.
“Mrs. Backyard’s goats are pretty exceptional,” he said, cupping his hands over his chest. “But your sister’s are right up there with Sophia Loren’s.”
Then he tossed his cigarette into the gutter, climbed inside his car, and drove away in a thick cloud of dust.
I looked down at my chest, slowly processing the double meaning of koza, the Czech word for “goat.” My sister did have big goats, and her popularity was in no small way due to their appearance. The bad things in Klara’s life had really improved with age, and maybe I could look forward to the same kind of changes when I was older, as my mother promised. But it all seemed so insultingly simple. I led Lisa back down the path to the farm, and understood that in order to be a real girl you didn’t need to be determined or clever. You didn’t need to ride horses or dance in Swan Lake.
All you needed was a great pair of goats.
eleven
THE HEDGEHOG
OF ALL THE TEACHERS at the Cernosice state school, I liked Eugina German the best. Mrs. German was a tall woman with permed hair and glossy lipstick, who had recently moved to Prague from South Moravia. She spoke in a Moravian “long beak” accent, which was the opposite of my grandmother’s “short beak” accent from the north, and I couldn’t help smiling when she swept into the classroom and introduced herself.
“Good morning and welcomes to grade four,” she said. “My name is Mrs. German, and I will be your teacher this year. And this”—she tilted her head toward the door, where a young boy was standing nervously—“is my son!”
Her cheeks glowed with motherly pride.
“But I wants you to forgets that I’m his mother while we’re here,” she continued. “I treats my students equally, and I’m much more severe with my son than I am with my ordinary pupils. Isn’t that right, Eugene? Please, takes a seat.”
Mrs. German pointed in my direction, and the boy obediently put his satchel on the hook beneath my bench and sat down on the empty seat next to mine. The girls behind us immediately started whispering. “Silence!” Mrs. German ordered from the front of the room. She sat down on the corner of her desk, which was a strange and modern thing for a teacher to do, and started to take a roll call. Once she had checked off all our names, she put her clipboard away and took off her jacket.
“We will begins the lesson with a five-minute warm-up,” she said. “It is good to exercise your body before you exercise your brain, so I would likes you to stand up now and stretch your arms and legs, and then we will brush up on our multiplication tables.”
A screeching of chairs swept through the room as we stood up and waited for Mrs. German to tell us what to do. She took a deep breath and planted her feet wide apart.
“How many of you are training for the Spartakiada?” she asked.
Monika and Alice Rabbit immediately put up their hands, along with a few other girls from Communist families.
The Spartakiada was a mass exercise that took place in Prague’s Strahov Stadium every five years. Hundreds of thousands of flag-waving families performed synchronized gymnastics in a huge demonstration of the collectivist spirit. The event was very much like an Olympic Games opening ceremony (only ten times bigger), and was broadcast on both channels o
f Czech TV. It was without question one of the most exciting events in the Communist calendar, and, predictably enough, I was forbidden to join in.
“Excellent,” Mrs. German nodded approvingly. “We will begins!”
For the next five minutes, our unusual new teacher took us through a series of light aerobic exercises. Mrs. German was very fit, and most of the class had a hard time keeping up with her.
“You move well,” she told me. “You’re not training for the Spartakiada?”
“No,” I said. “But I study ballet three times a week.”
“Very well,” Mrs. German smiled. “Perhaps you would likes to lead the class in our morning exercises from now on?”
“Yes, please,” I said eagerly. “I would likes this very much!”
We returned to our seats and I spent the rest of the day with my hand in the air, fighting to answer all of Mrs. German’s questions. She made a very strong first impression upon me, and I could tell that her son was clever in a shy and quiet way. I was glad, too, that I had someone nice to sit next to. Monika and Alice Rabbit were glaring at me again, which meant the popular girls would soon be giving me a hard time as usual.
After school, I caught the train to Radotin, for my piano lesson with Mrs. Lake. Mrs. Lake was a young and enthusiastic woman who was fond of children and loved to talk. With a bit of prompting, I could get her to tell me all about the in-fighting between the teachers at the music school, or how things were coming along with her new mother-in-law. I would sit at the piano with my fingers on the keys, pretending to study the sheet music I hadn’t bothered to practice, then I’d waylay Mrs. Lake into talking for an hour. The next thing we knew, the lesson would be over. There was one year where I managed to keep the Twelfth Etude by Carl Czerny on the music stand for twelve consecutive lessons. Despite my reluctance to practice, piano came relatively easily to me, and my afternoons with Mrs. Lake were a small source of pleasure in an otherwise hectic week. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I had ballet practice. Mrs. Saturday may have made an exception by taking me despite my size, but she made it very clear that she expected this favor to be repaid in sweat and tears. The fact that I was regularly late on Mondays didn’t help, and I sometimes wished I could skip my piano lessons entirely, as the pleasant hour spent chatting with Mrs. Lake was immediately followed by the ordeal of my father racing against the clock to get me to the National Theater on time.
My dad loved to drive. Seven years of driving taxis had honed his already reckless skills, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than driving my mother and me around Prague at high speeds. He would insist on picking me up from my piano lesson at the very last minute, and then we would hurtle into town in his yellow Skoda 120, weaving in and out of traffic and ignoring road signs.
On the Monday after I first met Mrs. German, I sat on the railing in front of the Radotin music school and waited for my dad, who was even later than usual. By a quarter past four, I had counted more than thirty yellow Skodas, but none of them belonged to my father. Finally, his car appeared in the distance. I could tell it was my dad. No one could quite make an engine howl like he could. He thundered up the road and screeched to a halt in front of the music school.
“Get in!” he growled, swinging the back door open.
I dove inside, banging my head against the ceiling.
“Dad, we’re really late!” I cried.
“I know! Shut the door and let me concentrate!” he ordered, turning the steering wheel and stepping on the accelerator. The tires squealed and I was thrown to the other side of the car.
“How long have we got?” he asked.
“Ten minutes,” I said, reading the clock on the dashboard.
This was our usual ritual, but we had never cut it as close as this before.
“What have you been doing?” I asked. “You know how much trouble I get in when I’m late!”
“I’ve spent the afternoon with Dr. Ulbert,” my dad replied. “He has a new invention. It’s a device for measuring electricity in the air. I just know we’re going to make a lot of money with it!”
Dr. Ulbert was a physicist my father had worked with briefly at an agricultural cooperative. They had formed an immediate friendship, which had survived my dad’s dismissal. The doctor had stayed in touch, largely because my father was very impressed by his many disastrous theories about electromagnetic energy. Dr. Ulbert had tufty white hair, like Albert Einstein, and an endless stream of ideas for inventions which my father attempted (and failed) to turn into patents. His last invention had been a crop-watering machine that was designed to fly above the fields on an electromagnetic current. My father had assembled a team of engineers and paid them out of his own pocket to build a prototype in our garage, but the device had steadfastly refused to fly. When it became obvious that the problem was in the design, not the engineering, my father had a long talk with Dr. Ulbert, in which the inventor grudgingly admitted that he had underestimated the force of gravity in his calculations. The amount of energy required to keep the device in the air turned out to be many times greater than the cost of watering crops by conventional means, and the project was ultimately scrapped. Strangely enough, despite having lost a lot of hard-earned money in Dr. Ulbert’s inventions, my dad continued to have faith in his friend, while my mother privately referred to the physicist as “Dr. Stein-Ein.”
“This new invention is an absolute winner!” my father said enthusiastically. “We’ll sell it to the Germans and make a pile of deutsche marks; then we’ll throw this rotten Skoda onto the trash pile and buy ourselves a brand-new Mercedes!”
“A Mercedes?” I protested. “You said we were going to buy a BMW.”
“I’ve looked into it,” my dad replied. “It turns out that a Mercedes has a much better engine than a BMW.”
“Last month, you said BMWs were better.”
“Well, that was last month! I’ve just read an interesting article on the subject. Medveds have better engines, end of story.” (Medved, the Czech word for “bear,” is the widely used Czech nickname for a Mercedes-Benz). My father and I loved to discuss the merits of Western cars, despite the fact that we hardly ever saw one, and my dad’s biggest ambition was to one day buy himself a really nice German car. In a funny kind of way, he deserved it. He frightened my mother to death on a regular basis, but he really was an excellent driver.
“How long have we got?” he asked.
I looked at the dashboard. “We haven’t!” I said desperately. “We’re three minutes late!”
The traffic lights changed, and my father drove up the tram tracks to overtake a row of cars. This was completely illegal and was the kind of thing that would have his fellow drivers writing down his license plate and denouncing him. We zipped around the yellow barricade and back out onto the road.
“You still want me to drop you off around the corner?” my dad grinned.
“No time!” I cried. “Let me out right here!”
I opened the door and leaped out onto the sidewalk. Another part of our Monday afternoon ritual was my dad dropping me off around the corner from school, because I had somehow tangled myself up in a huge lie wherein my father actually owned all the cars we liked to talk about. At the last count, we had a white Mercedes, a blue BMW, and a red Volvo in our garage. None of the girls believed me, of course, and catching me out had become a major pastime at the school. I just prayed that Mrs. Saturday had started the lesson already. The trouble I would get into for being late was nothing compared to the embarrassment and shame of being seen climbing out of a rusty Skoda.
I crossed the street and pushed my way through the big revolving doors. The glamorous mothers were already in the cafeteria, smoking foreign cigarettes, and I ran up the stairs to the junior studio, where I found my classmates shivering in the unheated dressing room. They wore white or pink leotards that their mothers had bought from Tuzex, along with thick woolen socks that had been cut into leg warmers. Their shoulder blades jutted out from their backs and th
eir arms and legs were as thin as broomsticks.
“Hello, Bara!” I called out to a fragile girl in an expensive leotard who was standing by herself. “How was your holiday?”
“Boring,” Bara sighed. “Mum dragged me to Italy and I spent two weeks lying on the beach.”
“Really?” I said, as though I couldn’t imagine anything more boring than going to Italy.
Bara Fisherova was my only friend at school. Her father was a successful painter who had a private agent and sold his paintings in the West, and her mother wore extravagant outfits and drove around Prague in a brand-new Fiat Uno, which was the only Fiat Uno in the country. But Bara was struggling in class as much as I was. She had never wanted to be a dancer. Her body was wrong for ballet, but her mother had pulled a lot of strings to get Mrs. Saturday to accept her, and the other girls teased her mercilessly. I was a good but unpopular dancer, so we usually stood next to each other. Whenever the class picked on Bara, I would try to stand up for her. Whenever the class picked on me, Bara would usually join in.
“It’s the first class of the year and you’re late,” Bara whispered.
“I couldn’t help it,” I whispered back. “My father was busy inventing a device to detect electricity in the air, and he forgot to pick me up.”
Renata and Ilona Walnut were stretching near the window, and they moved in closer to disrupt our conversation.
“Your father drives a yellow Skoda, admit it,” sneered Renata, whose eyes were slightly crossed.
“No, he doesn’t,” I said coolly. “He drives a blue BMW.”
The younger Ilona put her hand in front of her mouth to hide her braces. “We saw you out of the window!” she cried. “We saw you! You ran across the street!”
I smiled as though I wasn’t concerned. “That’s because our car is at the garage,” I said. “The mechanics lent us the Skoda to drive while they’re fixing the BMW.”
“I thought you said you would never be caught dead in a Skoda,” Bara laughed. “Why didn’t your dad take one of his other cars?”
The Twelve Little Cakes Page 30