The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  I walked over and introduced myself.

  “Hello! My name ith Dominika!” I said, lisping in Czech to try to make it sound Polish. “I’m on holidath from Prague. Ith it thafe to touch the jellyfith? They’re not going to thting you?”

  The Polish kids were very friendly. One of the boys picked up a jellyfish and turned it upside down.

  “They can’t sting you if you hold them like this,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter, because whenever you see a jellyfish washed up on a beach, it means it’s already dead. You want to throw one?”

  “Yeth, pleath,” I said.

  He handed me the jellyfish. It felt like I was holding a big see-through pudding.

  “Now throw it so it hits the face of a wave,” the boy said. “If you do it right, it will explode like a grenade.”

  I threw the jellyfish into the sea and watched it splatter against the water. It really did explode like a grenade. For the next hour and a half, the Polish kids and I gleefully blew up all the jellyfish we could find, until the one girl who owned a wristwatch announced that it was time to go home for “kolace.” This was very interesting. Kolace was the Czech for “cakes.”

  “You have kolace?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” the Polish kids replied.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’m going to have a yummy dinner ath well. My dad ith taking uth to the Hotel Romanth.”

  The Polish kids were very impressed.

  “Why are you lisping?” one of the boys asked me.

  “I’m trying to make my Czech thound Polith,” I told him.

  “Well, don’t. It sounds ridiculous,” the boy said. “We can all understand you. Would you like to come and see our apartment building?”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  The Polish kids lived in a big concrete panelak half a kilometer down the beach. I didn’t think it was possible, but their house was even uglier than the Friendship Pavilion, and a lot of people lived in close proximity to each other. My new friends invited me inside, but I had to go home for dinner, so I told them that I would see them tomorrow and sprinted home to change.

  At seven o’clock, my parents and I walked through the lobby of the Hotel Romance. My father was in an excellent mood and my mother looked very pretty. She wore a tight-fitting dress and a hat, and turned the heads of many German businessmen. The restaurant had high art nouveau ceilings and plush red carpet on the floors. A waiter in a white tuxedo ushered us over to our table. He wore white velvet gloves and had a napkin folded across his arm. With a flourish, he handed us the menus, which were bound in brown leather. All of the meals had French names.

  I ordered the soupe royale and had médaillons de jambon glacé à la Monte-Carlo as an appetizer. For the main course, I chose the soufflé de poisson. A piano tinkled away in the background as the waiter uncorked an expensive bottle of wine and poured a small amount into my father’s glass. My father inspected its texture against the light and made a show of tasting it. He nodded approvingly, and the waiter poured wine for both my parents as a bowl of soup materialized in front of me. It was then that we discovered the full extent of the food shortage in Poland.

  The soupe royale was a pink cherry soup. It was served cold, and tasted horrible. I took two mouthfuls and pushed it away. The appetizer was similarly unappealing. It came in a majestic silver serving tray, and I removed the lid with anticipation, only to discover that the médaillons de jambon were a roll of fatty ham in aspic that reminded me of the jellyfish I had thrown into the sea. I poked it with my fork and quickly put the lid back on the tray. My parents also left their food untouched, and I noticed that many Germans weren’t eating, either. It was heartbreaking, because the waiters behaved with such dignity. They were serving us the best food their kitchen could produce. The soufflé de poisson turned out to be a dish of mashed herring in a watery tomato sauce. It was difficult to eat, but I ate without complaint. I listened to the piano and watched the waiters fuss over the Germans, but I was secretly relieved when our waiter brought the little basket with the check, because I wanted to go home and eat some baked beans. The meal came to four hundred and eighty thousand zlotys. My father nonchalantly peeled ten notes from his tube and put them in the basket.

  “Keep the change,” he told the waiter, who bowed and walked away.

  “The Polish kids have cakes for dinner,” I said loudly.

  “Really?” My mother looked doubtful. “I had no idea the food situation was this bad. These poor people.”

  “They have cakes!” I exclaimed. “Do you think there’s somewhere around here where we could get cakes?”

  “Shh. Keep your voice down,” my mother said sternly.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The waiter came back to our table. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ve only given me two hundred and seventy-five thousand zlotys. You’ve probably mistaken the five thousand notes for the fifty thousand ones. This happens all the time.”

  He was very apologetic. He put the little basket back onto our table and waited for my dad to recount the money.

  The blood drained from my father’s face. He verified that he had underpaid the bill, and then pulled the roll of zlotys from his pocket and unwrapped the little tube. He examined the money the Wechsel man had given him, counting the zeros on the side of the banknotes.

  “Oh, dear,” he said calmly. “You’re right. It is hard to tell the difference.” And as we watched, he peeled another forty-five notes from his tube and handed them to the waiter. With the tip, the meal had cost us almost all the money my father had exchanged.

  Nobody spoke for a very long time.

  I listened to the piano, while the cigarette in my father’s hand burned down to a long stick of ash. The Wechsel man had used a very old technique to cheat us. Polish money was issued in multiples of thousands, and was similar to American money in that the different banknotes were the same color and size. The man with the gold teeth had put a small number of fifty thousand zloty notes on top of a large pile of five thousand zloty notes, rolling them into a tube so that the last zero was obscured. He then calmly watched my father (and me) count three million zlotys, when he had, in fact, given us less than half a million.

  We were now completely broke in Poland.

  My mother’s eyes were very wide and her mouth began to quiver, and then she unexpectedly let out a high-pitched giggle. My father and I looked at her with amazement. She was trying not to laugh, but was soon laughing so hard that tears were streaming down her cheeks, and I couldn’t help but join in. Pretty soon, my father was roaring as well. The German businessmen looked up from their tables as we left the restaurant in semihysterics, and we laughed all the way to the Friendship Pavilion. None of us mentioned the money from that moment on. We just laughed until we cried, which is the Czech way of dealing with disaster.

  FOR THE REST OF OUR VACATION, we ate baked beans for lunch and pork cutlets for dinner. My mother soaked her summer dress in Ajax and washed it by hand until it was as good as new, while my father spent a lot of time in front of his car, staring wistfully at the crack in the engine. Everything had gone spectacularly wrong, but we still managed to have a good holiday. I became friends with the Polish kids and spent my afternoons throwing jellyfish into the sea, and even started speaking a little Polish. It was very similar to Czech. I would say “Dzienkujemy bardzo” instead of “Thank you,” and “Dowidzenia” whenever I had to go home for dinner. After dinner, my new friends and I would meet in a public playground near the Friendship Pavilion, and stay outside and play games until it got dark.

  “Did you have cakes for dinner?” I would ask.

  “Tak,” they would reply. “U nas kolace.”

  “And you have cakes every night?” I would shake my head enviously. I was really sick of baked beans.

  “Of course.” The Polish kids seemed puzzled by the question.

  “I love cakes,” I said, after dropping many hints. “Do you think you could bring me one?”

  The Polish
kids looked very worried.

  “Okay,” they agreed after conferring between themselves. “The problem is, we don’t have much to bring you. We have only very little cakes.”

  “A little cake would be great!” I said happily.

  The following morning, I wolfed down my breakfast and ran down to the beach.

  “Dzien dobry!” I called out when I saw them. “Did you bring me a cake?

  A tiny girl called Kaczya, who was even smaller than me, smiled weakly and pulled a boiled egg out of her pocket.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is the best we could do.”

  “An egg?” I said. “I thought you would bring me kolace.”

  “Tak jest, we brought you what we had for kolacja last night,” the kids said. “Zalujemy bardzo, but we don’t have much to eat.”

  I suddenly understood that I had misheard them saying “kolace.” My ears were still blocked, and I realized with deep embarrassment that kolacja meant “dinner” in Polish. My friends were eating boiled eggs for dinner, and even so, they had brought me what little food they had.

  I didn’t want to offend them, so I said, “Dzienkujemy bardzo,” and accepted the egg. I tapped it on my forehead and started to peel it, when I suddenly had a very good idea.

  “Listen,” I said. “We have tons of food at our place! Why don’t you come and have lunch at the Friendship Pavilion!”

  It was the Polish kids’ turn to look embarrassed, but I was already leading them up the beach. I knocked on our apartment door, and my mother opened it and smiled at the pack of scrawny boys and girls behind me. I introduced my new friends and explained that I had invited them for lunch.“Dzien dobry,” my mother said to them in Polish. She invited them inside and told them to sit at the table, and then she opened the refrigerator and pulled out our remaining pork chops. My dad came in from the balcony and joined her in the kitchen, opening many cans of baked beans. The smell of food quickly filled the room. The Polish children were very polite. They called my father “sir” and mumbled answers to his questions, but when my mother handed them each a big plate of pork and beans, their eyes lit up and they ate with relish, telling us about their lives in Miedzyzdroje. Most of their fathers worked in the dockyards and most of their mothers were pregnant. They went to school on Saturdays and church on Sundays, and dreamed of becoming astronauts or emigrating to America. After they cleaned their plates, my mother served them a second helping, and when they had finished, my dad gave each of them a bottle of Czech beer to give to their fathers.

  My new friends were very sad when I told them that we had to go home to Prague in the morning. They insisted on swapping addresses, and we ended up writing to each other for many years on.

  THE NEXT MORNING, my parents and I drove to Gdansk. It was only three hundred kilometers away, but it took us the whole day to get there. It was long after sunset when we finally arrived. We drove around and around, looking for the garage the mechanics in Szczecin had told us about, until we took a wrong turn into a narrow cul-de-sac that ended right at the dockyards. My father changed gear and attempted to execute his famous three-point turn, but the engine spluttered to a halt as usual. Push-starting the car without help was impossible. We sat in exasperated silence, staring at the sea. A searchlight cone randomly pulsed across the water, and the sound of police sirens echoed in the distance. It was nearly midnight and we were completely exhausted.

  My dad opened the door and climbed out of the car.

  “I’m going to ask for help,” he said wearily.

  A nearby house had a light in the window, and my father paused in front of the high wooden fence. He rang the bell on the gate, and a couple of dogs started to bark in the yard. After a few moments, a man unlatched the window.

  “Kto tam?” he called out. “What do you want?”

  “Dzien dobry,” my father said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but my family and I are from Czechoslovakia and our car broke down in front of your house. Do you know if there is any kind of hotel or a hostel around here?”

  “Wait a minute,” the man said.

  He shut the window and appeared at the gate a few minutes later. We could hear him talking to my dad, and he cautiously stuck his head outside the fence to verify that two women were sitting in a broken Czech Skoda.

  “Honza, Dominika, come here!” my father called.

  My mother and I climbed out of the car and ventured over to the Polish man’s gate.

  “These are my wife and daughter,” my father explained. “Don’t worry, I understand your concern.”

  The Polish man was a stocky, tough-looking fellow. He looked us up and down suspiciously, registering our exhaustion and my mother’s beauty. Then he checked the street to see if there were any suspicious cars parked nearby. When he was satisfied that our plight was genuine, his face relaxed.

  “You’ll have to forgive me. But when a stranger turns up in the middle of the night wearing one of those”—he pointed at my dad’s Solidarnosz pin—“you immediately assume he’s with the secret police. Why don’t you get your things and follow me inside?”

  We were greeted by a plump woman whom he introduced as his wife. She had no idea who we were or why her husband had invited us in, but she led us into the kitchen and offered us a cup of tea and biscuits. She also brought a jar of pickled fish from her pantry, along with a loaf of chewy black bread.

  “We’ll put you up in our spare room,” the man said. “The child looks like she’s about to fall asleep, and there are no hotels around here you’d want to go to. This is a dangerous town. You hear those sirens? The police cruise the bay looking for people trying to jump a boat to Sweden. It would be hard to make them believe your car just happened to break down near the water.”

  My dad was very grateful for the Polish man’s offer. He opened his suitcase and produced the last bottle of homemade gin, which my mother had hidden in her nightgown. The Polish woman brought four glasses from her cupboard, and my father filled them and passed them around.

  “My name is Jarda. This is Jana and Dominika,” he said. “I worked for the Czech government during the Prague Spring. The Communists have been on our case ever since.”

  The Polish man snorted with amusement. “No kidding?” he said. “I’m Tadeusz, this is Elena. We worked with Walesa organizing the strike of ’81. The Communists have been making our lives hell for the past four years as well.”

  “Really?” my father said. “You’re with Solidarity, then?”

  “Tak jest,” the man nodded. “I’m a dockworker. It comes with the territory.”

  The adults drank their gin, and my father cheerfully poured a second round. The kitchen, like so many kitchens I sat in as a child, was quickly filled with cigarette smoke and laughter. I ate my pickled fish and struggled to keep my eyes open until suddenly my dad was carrying me upstairs. He tucked me up in a strange bed and kissed me on the nose, and then I heard him creaking back down the staircase. I fell asleep listening to voices floating up from the kitchen.

  “. . . becoming desperate!”

  “. . . heads will roll like cabbages!”

  “. . . can hear the Politburo grinding their teeth!”

  The following morning, I woke to the sound of my parents carrying our bags down the stairs. “Hurry up.” My mother poked her head inside my room. “Tadeusz has made an appointment at a garage. He knows a mechanic who might fix our car for free!”

  We spent the morning at a small garage in Gdansk, where Tadeusz’s friends did their best to fix our car. My father handed out his remaining beers, and the Polish mechanics filled the crack in the engine with some kind of silicon glue. They treated Tadeusz with great respect, and later on, my father told me that he was an important member of the Solidarity movement. He had gone to a lot of trouble to help us get home safely. He had even taken the morning off from work.

  “This is only a temporary solution,” the mechanics told my dad. “You can drive at normal speed, but whatever you do, don’t let
your engine die or you might not be able to start it again. When you get back to Prague, you had better get your mechanic friends to give you back your old engine. This one’s ready for the scrap heap.”

  “Don’t worry,” my father snorted. “I’ll be paying their garage a visit as soon as I get back.”

  We said good-bye to Tadeusz and gave him our address in Cernosice. He and his wife would be welcome to stay with us whenever they came to Prague.

  My father turned the ignition and the engine came to life. It sounded strong and confident. The mechanics looked pleased.

  “Remember. No stopping between here and your front door!” Tadeusz grinned.

  “Dzienkujemy bardzo!” I called out as we drove away. “Dowidzienia!”

  WE HAD A SEVEN-HUNDRED-KILOMETER drive in front of us, no money, and almost no food. Fifty empty beer bottles rattled in our trunk. Our financial situation was so bad that my father intended to return the bottles for their deposit once we were back in Czechoslovakia. Each empty bottle was worth one crown, and fifty crowns would buy us a cheap meal at a pub across the border. As we drove out of Gdansk, the sky became overcast. It started to rain, and the rhythm of the window wipers made me sleepy. I snuggled up in a blanket and felt warm and safe.

  “I can’t wait to get home,” I declared. “I’m going to have my ears cleaned out, and then I’m going to eat something yummy. Maybe Renzo will have some Italian food left over!”

  “Don’t get too excited,” my mother said from the front seat. “You’re going to the conservatory, remember? You don’t want to end up like Vendula Backyard.”

  “She gets to eat chocolates and ride horses all day!” I pointed out.

  “Yes, she does, but she doesn’t get to dance in Swan Lake. You still want to dance in Swan Lake, don’t you?”

  “I guess so,” I sighed.

  “Well, now,” my father said with his usual optimism. “This was a bit of an unusual holiday, but everything turned out okay in the end. Next time, it’s going to be really great! Once we make some money with the aparatura, we’ll buy a new car and drive to Italy!”