The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  “And who would that be?” my mother smiled.

  “I’m not telling,” I said mysteriously. “It’s a surprise!”

  The morning of the premiere, there was a letter addressed to me in our mailbox. The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar, but when I opened it, I discovered that it was from my grandparents. I read the letter slowly and then took it down to the kitchen and showed it to my mother.

  Dear Dominika,

  Thank you for inviting us. We will not attend the premiere and we return your tickets. Your mother has renounced us in writing and destroyed our relationship with some of her other actions. This is why we request that you leave us in peace and stop bothering us.

  The Cermaks

  Two tickets to The Ant Ferda fell out of the envelope and fluttered to the floor. I had sent them to my grandfather five days earlier, along with a friendly letter it took me half a day to write.

  “Oh, Trumpet,” my mother sighed. “I’m so sorry. You should have told me you were going to invite them.”

  “I wanted it to be a surprise,” I said sadly.

  I picked the tickets up from the floor and wondered what I should do with them. They were very valuable, and it would be a pity to throw them away.

  I thought about this for a moment, and then I had a very good idea. I would invite Eugene and his mother to the show! They were from Moravia and didn’t have party connections, and it was obvious that Mrs. German really loved the theater. A ticket to the Golden Chapel would be something they would appreciate much more than my grandparents, who were so used to the privileges of their Communist lifestyle that they didn’t even go to half the things they were invited to.

  “We could invite Eugene and Mrs. German!” I said. “Eugene is going to hold his thumbs for me, so maybe he can hold his thumbs and watch me at the same time.”

  “That’s a good idea,” my mother agreed. “Would you like me to call them?”

  “Yes, please!” I said. “And afterward, maybe we can go to Slavia as a special treat. What do you think?”

  Slavia was an expensive restaurant directly opposite the National Theater. Whenever the secret police were making my dad’s life misery, he would take us to Slavia for dinner to show them that his spirit wasn’t broken. He couldn’t afford to do this, of course, but I didn’t know that at the time. Those special dinners at Slavia are some of my fondest childhood memories.

  “I don’t know about that,” my mother smiled. “We’ll have to ask your father.”

  At a quarter to seven that evening, I stood in the wings of the Golden Chapel with the other junior dancers. This was it. I was finally going to perform in front of an audience. The theater was empty, but the orchestra had started to tune their instruments in the pit. Suddenly, Mrs. Saturday clapped her hands and told us to take our positions. She was wearing her very best apronlike dress, and pretended to kick our bottoms as we ran onto the stage.

  “Ptui, ptui, ptui,” she whispered to each of us. “Let the devils take you!”

  The doors swung open and I heard the audience rumble in. It was exciting, but terrifying as well. There’s nothing quite like an opening night to set your nerves on edge. I took my position and waited for the conductor to tap the stand with his baton, and, as the curtain drew open, I swarmed around the anthill with the other eggs and ants. Mrs. Saturday had cast me as a naughty egg, so I got to disobey the ant who played our nurse. I hopped gleefully up and down and danced deliberately out of time, and by the end of the scene, I had annoyed the nurse so much that she pretended to spank my bottom before pulling me offstage.

  During the intermission, I took the elevator up to the dressing room, exchanged my foam-rubber egg for a black leotard and a plastic helmet with antennae, and then went backstage and quietly waited for the final scene.

  Like so many Czech plays produced during the Communist regime, The Ant Ferda was a children’s tale festooned with political ideology. Ferda, a single-minded ant (who reminded me of my father), decides to leave the colony and set up shop on his own. He goes out into the world and has many adventures before ultimately realizing that he’s better off in a collective. In the final act, he returns to the colony and all the ants rush out to greet him. The whole cast ran onstage and we formed a giant circle around Ferda, waving red handkerchiefs above our heads as we danced. The music swelled and the dancing became more triumphant, and then the conductor struck the air with his baton and everybody froze.

  After a moment of silence, the theater shook with applause. The curtain closed and then opened again, and the cast took turns bowing. A ticket lady ran onstage with a basket of flowers for the lead ballerina, and a minute later, the junior chorus and I lined up to take our bows. I heard my father yelling, “Bravo!” and looked into the orchestra seats in time to see Mrs. German lifting Eugene up to the balustrade. She called my name, and Eugene threw a rose in my direction. I tried to catch it, and would have fallen into the orchestra pit, had someone not grabbed me from behind. The stem of the rose brushed the tips of my fingers and then fell down into the horn section. The junior chorus bowed once more and was hurried off backstage. The curtain closed for the final time and the applause died away.

  I went up to the dressing room and changed out of my costume, and was walking back to the elevator when a man wearing a black tuxedo stopped me in the hallway. He was carrying a black trumpet case in one hand and a white rose in the other.

  “Are you Dominika?” he asked me. “If you are, I’ve been told that this might belong to you.”

  He offered me the rose and I accepted it eagerly.

  “Thank you very much!” I exclaimed.

  “Don’t mention it,” the trumpet player laughed. “I’m just glad you’re not the lead ballerina. Your flower landed on my head. I don’t think I would have survived the whole basket.”

  He smiled at his own joke, and we rode the elevator down to the lobby together. I clutched the rose and felt unbelievably happy. I had danced in my first ballet and received my first flower. I pressed the petals to my nose and took in the sweet fragrance, not minding its broken stem and battered appearance. It was mine and I had earned it, and I carried it delightedly out of the elevator and down into the lobby where my parents were waiting.

  twelve

  THE LITTLE TUBE

  IN 1985, FOUR DAYS after I turned ten, Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. A feeling of liberation swept through Czechoslovakia. Even the monotone of the Voice of America’s broadcaster, Karel Jezdinsky, started to crackle with hope. My father was beside himself. He was convinced that Cold War communism was finally coming to an end, and took to wearing the Solidarnosz pin Mr. Poloraich had given him as a joke. Whenever he was interviewed by the secret police, he pinned it to his lapel to let them know that the times were changing. Still, nothing much changed. After one particularly heated interrogation in which he told the STB that it would be they, not he, who would soon be unemployed, he was fired from his job and threatened with prison for vagrancy under article 203 of the criminal code.

  “The bastards are becoming desperate!” he’d exclaim in the mornings. “I can hear the Politburo grinding their teeth!” He would rub his hands gleefully and wolf down his breakfast, and then he would throw on his jacket and drive away in search of work.

  One day in early April, he came home very late with a sack of potatoes and a barrel of wine in his trunk. He had found a job at an agricultural cooperative in South Moravia, near the famous fields of Austerlitz where Napoleon had defeated Austria and Russia. The chief of the cooperative was a short, temperamental man called Comrade Maxian, who liked to think of himself as a modern-day Napoleon. He was a Communist with strong capitalist leanings, and cleverly used ideology to run his cooperative in the style of a land baron. Comrade Maxian recognized a fellow entrepreneur in my father and cheerfully overlooked his bad papers. He took my dad on a tour of his private wine cellar, where they quickly fell into a long discussion about Gorbach
ev and the changes he was likely to make in Eastern Europe. By sunset, my father had pitched Comrade Maxian two of Dr. Stein-Ein’s inventions, along with the concept of turning ideas into patents and selling them in West Germany. The agricultural chief was very impressed. Uncorking the fourth bottle of wine for the evening, he authorized my father to develop ideas and build prototypes for the cooperative. Comrade Maxian would finance these inventions and provide political cover, while my father would assemble the necessary teams of scientists and technicians. They shook hands on what would become the first stage of their collaboration—a small chemical factory in our garage.

  By the time Gorbachev had appeared on Russian television, my father, in the true spirit of perestroika, had turned our garage into a medium-sized laboratory. Bags of cement and boxes of tiles were hauled out and deposited into the backyard, where they slowly disappeared into a jungle of weeds, and the huge pile of sand that had been sitting in front of our driveway for two years was shoveled over the fence, only to be replaced by barrels of lye and epichloride.

  A few days later, the first laboratory truck showed up in our street. Mr. Simek lingered over his lawn clippings as my father helped the driver unload his equipment. These deliveries became a weekly occurrence, and the Simeks, Acorns, Caesars, and Haseks watched with interest as boxes and barrels were carried into our garage. Soon afterward, strange vapors began to emanate from the house. The smell of ammonia was quite overpowering, confirming the neighbors’ suspicions that whatever it was my father was up to, it must be illegal.

  In our garage, a team of technicians was assembling the aparatura, which was Dr. Stein-Ein’s latest invention. It was a high-tech chemical distillery, connected to a state-of-the-art computer the size of a wardrobe. The computer looked like something out of a fifties science fiction film, and was made by TESLA, the state-run electronics factory. The name TESLA was the subject of an old and bitter joke in the scientific community. It was said to stand for TEchnicky SLAba, which translates as “technically weak,” but Dr. Stein-Ein was very proud of his computer. “It may be slow, but it’s unbreakable!” he would declare. My mother, Klara, and I watched nervously as he tried out his invention for the first time. My mother was very tense, and told me in a low voice that along with the lye and epichloride, some of the barrels in the garage contained highly toxic nerve gas and contact poisons.

  “If you ever hear an explosion or smell almonds, you must jump out of the window and run away from the house,” she warned me on many occasions. Which was funny, because for the next three years the smell of cyanide in our yard was almost as constant as the smell of ammonia. In fact, compared to the ammonia, the almond smell was quite pleasant, and after an apprehensive period, we did what we always did with my father’s crazy projects.

  We learned to live around it.

  As spring gave way to summer, I discovered that I had grown two centimeters taller. My costumes started to fit, and I performed in children’s ballets three times a week and deposited my earnings into my savings account. By the end of June, I had saved 2,650 Czech crowns, which was more than my mother’s monthly salary at the Economic Institute. More exciting, I had passed three rounds of auditions for the State Conservatory, and was on the short list for next year’s students. When the summer holidays began, I found myself nervously awaiting a letter from the conservatory. Every morning, I would sit on top of a barrel of lye and listen for the sound of Mrs. Rufferova’s bike. Mrs. Rufferova was the Cernosice postmistress and something of a town legend, as she had delivered the mail for the past twenty years on her husband’s old motorcycle. She rode incredibly fast and was very hard to catch. She would speed up and down our street, stuffing Red Right newspapers into our neighbors’ mailboxes, and I would have to dash out onto the road and wave my arms to make her stop.

  “Hello, Mrs. Rufferova! Do you have anything for me today?” I would ask her.

  “Not a thing, sweetie!” she would bellow over the sound of her engine, although sometimes she would have a letter for my sister. Without braking, she would execute a sharp turn in front of our garage and toss me a foreign-looking package with an Italian stamp. I’d watch her zoom off down the street, then take the letter up to Klara’s bedroom. During the summer holidays, my sister spent a lot of time in bed.

  “Is it for me? Is it for me?” she would scream. “It is! It’s a letter from Renzo!” She’d snatch the package from my hand and glare at me until I left her to read it in peace. Bringing Klara her letters was often more stressful than waiting for mine.

  On the days when there was no mail, I would pluck a bunch of daisies from Mr. Simek’s gutter and despondently pull off their petals.

  “Yes, they’ll take me. No, they won’t,” I’d whisper as I stripped each daisy. My heart would sink with each unfavorable answer, and I’d toss the bad daisy into the drain and grab a new one. The gutter would slowly fill up with petals until my mother called me in for lunch.

  A week after I’d given up waiting, Mrs. Rufferova parked her scooter in the driveway and rang the front doorbell. I ran upstairs and watched in fascination as she fished a certified mail envelope out of her bag. She asked me to sign a delivery form and gave me a broad smile as I filled out the paperwork. “Ptui, ptui, ptui!” she said, pretending to spit on the floor. I was too scared to open the envelope, so I took it downstairs to my father. I handed him the letter with trembling hands and he called my mother and sister into the room. We stood around him as he cut the envelope open with a kitchen knife.

  “Dear Dominika,” he read. “We are pleased to announce”—he paused dramatically—“that you have been accepted to study at the State Conservatory in Prague!”

  I cried with relief and my mother swept me into her arms. My father was delighted, and even my sister, who tended to take a dim view of anything requiring discipline or exercise, seemed happy for me. We had a wonderful lunch, and later in the afternoon I ran around Cernosice, attempting to share the news with anyone I could find. The streets were hot and dusty, and the town was deserted except for a handful of weekenders from Prague who hung around in front of the pastry shop. Everyone else was away on vacation. Terezka Jandova had gone to Bulgaria with her parents, Eugina and Eugene German were visiting their relatives in Moravia, and Dana Bukova and the other horse-loving girls were away at the Pioneer camps. I was disappointed but not surprised. Traditionally, my family was the only family in town that didn’t have the time or money to go on holidays.

  Sometimes I wished that my father would take us to a nice place where we could eat ice cream and lie on the beach, but I knew it would never happen, because he was very restless and would somehow manage to turn the holiday into a business trip. Also, my mother had used up all of her vacation time helping my father build his factory. She was due back at the Economic Institute the day after Comrade Maxian had signed the contract my father had prepared. The problem was, there was no guarantee that Comrade Maxian would sign it. He wanted to see the aparatura in action first, he unexpectedly told my father a month after they had made their agreement, and an inspection was scheduled for the fourteenth of July. My father was optimistic about the outcome, but my mother was worried to the point where she was having difficulty sleeping. One night, when I crept out of bed to go to the bathroom, I overheard her telling my dad that if Comrade Maxian didn’t sign the contract, we would have to sell our house to pay Dr. Stein-Ein’s expenses.

  The next morning, I went to church and prayed to my little god.

  Hello, my little god.

  I’m really trying to do my very best to please you,

  and I’m grateful to you for helping me to get into the State Conservatory.

  But could you also please make Comrade Maxian sign my father’s contract?

  So we don’t have to sell our house? Please please please?

  Thank you. Amen.

  For the next two days, I helped my mother in the kitchen, where she was preparing a delicious meal in the hope of feeding Comrade Maxian into
signing the contract. I cooked caramel, which my mother used to make homemade rum out of the pure alcohol my dad had used the aparatura to distill while Dr. Stein-Ein wasn’t looking. I also picked juniper berries in the forest, which we used to flavor the alcohol so that it tasted like gin. We put the rum and gin in the empty bottles left by Tomas Glatz and Mr. Poloraich after their frequent visits.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this, you know,” my mother told me. “It’s illegal to make your own alcohol. If the neighbors denounced us, we’d be thrown into prison.”

  She flared her nostrils to emphasize the gravity of her statement. “You must never tell anyone!” she said. And then she went back to whisking egg whites for her famous apricot cake.

  THE DAY OF THE VISIT, our house was bustling with activity. My mother had risen at the crack of dawn and was stuffing an enormous goose in the kitchen, while my father polished the aparatura and Dr. Stein-Ein fine-tuned the computer. At ten o’clock, I volunteered to go outside and wait for Comrade Maxian’s car. I sat on top of a lye barrel and listened for the sound of approaching engines, but with the exception of Mrs. Rufferova’s scooter, the town was silent. After a while, I realized that Mr. Hasek was watching me from his kitchen window. Shortly afterward, he ventured outside his front gate. He performed his usual ritual of looking up and down the street, and then made his way over to where I was sitting. I knew what he was up to. He was going to ask me, yet again, what was inside our garage and why my father wasn’t looking for a job. Mr. Hasek was a notorious gossip, but I didn’t have to worry too much about him informing on us as he was very old and had Alzheimer’s disease. By the time he returned home, he would not only have forgotten what I told him, but that we had even talked in the first place. If I stayed outside in the street long enough, he would see me from his kitchen window and come back out and ask me the same questions all over again.