The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  “Hello!” I called out. “We’re off to feed the swans!”

  “Ahoj, Dominika and Klara!” they chorused. “And here comes Bohousek, looking fatter than usual.”

  “His name is Barry!” I said proudly. “He was on television!”

  “We know. We’ve seen him,” the neighbors smiled.

  “Doesn’t she look like a little garden gnome?” Mrs. Simkova from across the road chuckled. “Maybe we could plant her at the foot of our garden.”

  “No!” I told her. “I have to be home in time to see the Baby Jesus!”

  The neighbors laughed and I followed Barry and my sister to the end of the street. Just before the bend, we turned into the little pedestrian laneway that zigzagged down the hill. From here we could see the entire Cernosice valley. The windows of the houses were dusted with frost, and icicles hung from every gutter. We walked all the way down to the little row of shops, which were still open, as December 24 wasn’t a public holiday. We went to the grocery store and tied Barry to the bicycle racks outside the front door. The windows were decorated with flickering Christmas lights and tinsel, and there was a long line of people waiting to get in.

  “They’ve probably sold all the rolls by now,” my sister muttered.

  “Sit, Barry! Sedni!” I said as we joined the line.

  We always stood in line when we went to the shops, but it wasn’t because there was a shortage of food. There was plenty of food in Czechoslovakia; what we didn’t have was variety. The shelves were full of packages of rice and flour and butter and sugar, but they were plain-wrapped and there was only one brand. The practice of arriving early and standing in line was caused by the slowness of the shopkeepers, who made a point of talking to everyone. Favored customers would be told what kind of under-the-counter goods were available and when they were expected to arrive, and shopping could be infuriatingly social. Maintaining a good relationship with the local shopkeepers was very important, so no one complained. But it was very frustrating. Bread and milk sold out quickly, and we often waited in line for half an hour, only to find crumbs in the bread box and sour puddles where the bags of milk had once been. Still, I loved going to the shops, because there were lots of little cakes in the bakery, and many different kinds of sausages in the delicatessen. If there were three things every shop in our country could be counted upon to have in abundance, they were beer, sausages, and little cakes.

  Czech beer is world-famous, of course, but we also have a big pastry-and-sausage tradition. When I think of my childhood, I think of little cakes and sausages, because they were symbolic of the way we lived under communism. Before the Second World War, we were similar to the Germans and Austrians in that we had a town mentality. Local businesses survived because of neighborhood goodwill, and communities were tight-knit and civic-minded. When the Communists took over, they destroyed our town mentality by coercing neighbors, friends, and even families into denouncing each other for anti-Communist activities. In the early years, the punishments handed out were sufficiently harsh to destroy any kind of trust between neighbors, forcing communities to live in a constant state of fear. After a while, this fear was replaced by a numb compliance in which neighbors would greet each other as “comrade” and profess great admiration for the Socialist state. For forty years we did this, watching with weary resignation as our buildings fell to pieces and our roads went unrepaired. We talked the nonsense of the system, and the system rewarded us with cheap booze, public holidays, and little sausages and cakes. No afternoon tea at the local Politburo was complete without an array of little cakes wrapped in pastry-shop paper; no cigarette break at the local pub was truly satisfying unless there was a fat sausage in mustard to accompany the several pints of beer one knocked back in quick succession. For the majority of the Czech working class, a boring but easy state job and a barbecue every weekend was enough to keep them going through the hard times of communism. Which was something the people in power were counting on.

  Standing in front of the pastry counter, I could see over twenty different kinds of little cakes. My favorites were the marzipan fruit, the swan, and the little indian. All the cakes were homemade and they were very cheap. My mother had given Klara ten crowns to buy some bread rolls for the swans, but there was no question that she would buy us some little cakes as well.

  “Which one would you like?” she asked me.

  “A marzipan apple and a swan?” I said hopefully.

  My sister nodded at the pastry-shop lady, who used a long spatula to scoop the cakes out of the display case.

  “Anything else?” the lady asked.

  “And a Little Indian! Because it’s Christmas! Please?”

  “Okay. Just this once,” my sister sighed.

  We bought our bag of bread for the swans, and then walked outside to find Barry surrounded by his usual crowd of admirers feeding him their Christmas groceries. He ate everything they gave him, without even bothering to look and see what it was. He just opened his mouth and rolled his eyes like he did in the movies, making everyone roar with laughter.

  “Let’s go, Barry!” I grabbed his collar to let everyone know that I was his friend. The crowd was very impressed. We untied Barry and led him down the street, past the Hotel Slanka and across the railway tracks to the Berounka River. There was a weir and a mill directly opposite the station, and a pedestrian bridge between the weeping willow trees. We crossed the bridge to the middle of the river, and Klara lifted me up onto the railing so that I could see the swans beneath us.

  “Hello, swans!” I cried. “We’ve brought you some bread.”

  In the old days, the Berounka River was very clean and full of beavers. Now the beavers were gone and the water was brown, but it was still very picturesque. The water was frozen solid on the far side of the bridge, but the fifty-meter stretch between the bridge and the weir remained unfrozen and was a favorite nesting place for ducks and swans. There were at least a dozen swans and they were very elegant, vaulting their necks gracefully to catch each piece of bread we threw. The ducks were quick and rude and tried to steal the bread from the beaks of the swans. They beat their wings and ran on the water, while the swans clacked their beaks in anger. The commotion grew so loud that Barry decided to get in on the act. He was a good-natured dog, but he also knew how big and powerful he was, and when he decided to bark, it could be quite frightening. He towered above my sister and me as he stood on his hind legs and barked at the ducks.

  “Sit, Barry!” I said. “Sedni! Sedni, Barry! Shhh!”

  Barry looked down at me and began to lick my face. He stopped barking, but continued to lean on the railing and look out across the river as though he was contemplating the mysteries of life.

  When we had finished throwing bread to the swans, Klara looked at her watch and announced that it was time to go home. The sky had turned dark as we walked back through the town, and the street lamps snapped on with a buzzing sound. We zigzagged up the hill, exhaling clouds of steam and stamping our boots to keep our toes warm.

  There was a Christmas tree in a window overlooking the path, lit up and glowing through the frost-encrusted glass.

  “Oh, no!” I cried. “The Baby Jesus is here already!”

  I grabbed Barry’s leash and tried to make him run through the snow, but he wasn’t very interested in running. Neither was my sister. They both continued to plod up the hill, and I was very upset by the time we got home. I was sure that we had missed the Baby Jesus. I dashed inside the front door and kicked off my boots, and then my heart began to pound with excitement as I heard the sound of a bell ringing downstairs. I raced down to the kitchen, then back up to the living room and into my parents’ bedroom, where I found myself standing in front of the most wonderful tree. The room smelled of pine needles and potpourri, and it was dark except for the Christmas lights and candles. “Silent Night” crackled softly from the radio, and I was so overwhelmed I almost burst into tears. Then my parents switched on the lights. “Vesele Vanoce!”


  “Merry Christmas!” I ran to the window. “Thank you, Baby Jesus! Thank you for such a lovely tree!”

  The sky outside the window had just turned black, and I waved at the stars and vowed that I would thank the Baby Jesus properly next year. My mother cleared a space in front of the tree and we all sat down to open our presents. Each package was wrapped in colorful paper and was tied with a ribbon with a little name tag attached. I knelt in front of the gingerbread “Bethlehem” my mother made every year, and wondered what the Baby Jesus had brought me. I couldn’t read yet, so I handed all the interesting-looking packages to my sister and asked if they were mine.

  “This one! What does this one say?” I demanded, pointing to the biggest box in the pile.

  “It says . . . Dominika!” Klara smiled.

  She placed the big present in front of me, and I untied the ribbon and tore the box open.

  “It’s a pair of skis!” I squealed. “The Baby Jesus has brought me my very own pair of skis!”

  The short yellow skis were unbelievably nice. They were decorated with two little rows of cartoon ducks, and even came with a pair of matching ski poles. I ran and put on my shoes, and then strapped myself into the skis and spent the rest of the evening walking around the house in them.

  “I can ski!” I called out. “Look! I’m good at it already!”

  I tried to steer myself with the poles, but it wasn’t very easy. The skis kept getting tangled up and I kept falling on my bum until my mum and dad took me by the hands and swung me off the ground. They carried me between them and I skied through the air into the living room, where the table was set with our best plates and glasses.

  “Here’s the Christmas carp,” my mother said, uncovering a tray she had brought from the kitchen. “It’s very tasty, but be careful, it’s full of bones.”

  She put a piece of fried carp on my plate, along with a scoop of potato salad. Savory ham rolls and soup with liver dumplings were the traditional Christmas appetizers, and after that we would devour the fried carp. My mother’s Christmas dinners were always delicious, but my favorite part was dessert, when we ate the biscuits we had baked. We had made enough biscuits to keep us going through the New Year, and I sat in front of the tree with a little basket of biscuits and felt very happy in my little yellow skis. After that, my mother played Christmas carols on the piano and we all sang.

  “Hurry up to Bethlehem, doodleai, doodleai, doodleai day,” my father growled in his deep voice, while my sister and I tried to harmonize above him. Klara had a good ear for melody, but she always sang quietly, whereas I always sang as loudly as possible, making the words and melody up as I went along. My mother didn’t sing at all, because she wasn’t very good at it, but she was an excellent pianist and could sight-read all the carols in the book. I took off my skis and stood on the piano stool and turned the pages for her. She smiled at me to let me know when she was ready. We sang with gusto, ignoring the Nedbals as they banged on the ceiling with a broom.

  “Shut up!” they yelled. “We can’t hear the television!”

  My father smiled like a wolf and began to sing even louder, and soon I was singing at the top of my lungs. My mother signaled me to turn another page, and then she looked at me with tears in her eyes. The little girl who had demanded to be born. I stood on the stool and sang along with my family, unaware of how much hope I had brought into their lives.

  two

  THE ROOF

  MRS. NEDBAL’S SLY REMARKS in the bathroom were more serious than I ever could have known. The following April, my parents went to the Supreme Court to try to stop the Red Countess from throwing us out. Even though one-third of the house legally belonged to my mother, the Red Countess had used her political connections to scare a number of judges into ruling in her favor.

  She hired two expensive attorneys to build a case against my parents, and employed the Nedbals to eavesdrop on their conversations, both on the phone and through the walls.

  The Red Countess maintained that my parents were conspiring against the Socialist state, and wanted to disinherit my mother from the property her Communist grandfather had left her. It was a long and ugly battle. My parents had already lost in the district, regional, and city courts of Prague, and knew that if their appeal to the Supreme Court was unsuccessful, not only would they be evicted but they would also be ruined by their obligation to pay my grandmother’s legal expenses. Realistically, my parents had no chance, and everyone knew it. Mrs. Nedbal’s smile was even sharper than usual, and my parents took to whispering in the house and sending me outside to practice my skiing. I became very good on my little yellow skis, but my parents were too distracted to watch me.

  We needed a miracle, and a miracle appeared out of the blue one evening as my father was driving his regular taxi route through Prague. He was hailed by an old man outside Charles University. The man turned out to be the legendary attorney Dr. Safranek, who was known as the “White Fox” in legal circles, due to the fact that he hardly ever lost a case. He was very old and didn’t accept clients anymore, but he listened to my dad’s story and gave my father his card. The following day, my parents went to his office in a desperate attempt to persuade him to represent them. After their last appeal, their lawyers had resigned and told them that their attempt to keep the house was hopeless. Dr. Safranek knew exactly who the Red Countess was, and he wasn’t very optimistic. But he took another look at my mother and saw her lovely Mona Lisa smile and, against his better judgment, he decided to defend her.

  “Come back in a week. I’ll sniff around and see what I can come up with,” he told my parents.

  Dr. Safranek had no illusions about Communist justice. He knew that the only way to win the case would be to play the same kind of game my grandmother was playing. The Red Countess was a big fish, and the best way to get rid of a big fish was to find an even bigger fish to eat her. Through his private information network, he discovered that Comrade Pastorek, the judge who had thrown my parents’ appeal out of the city court, was a man with a lot of powerful enemies, and he came up with a cunning strategy that had nothing to do with the legal merits of the case.

  Comrade Pastorek had been a judge in the time of Stalin, and had sent thousands of people to Communist “reeducation” camps in the late forties and fifties. Back in those days, it was not only dissidents and intellectuals who were sent to these camps, but also important Communist officials who were routinely purged to destabilize their power. Many of these officials were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, and a few of them even regained their political status. The most famous rehabilitated politician at the time (and who happened to have been sent to prison by Comrade Pastorek) was none other than Comrade Gustav Husak, the president of Czechoslovakia.

  When my mother returned to Dr. Safranek’s office the following week, the White Fox suggested that she write a letter to the president explaining the situation and pointing out that the judge who had ruled in the Red Countess’s favor was the same judge who had sent him to prison twenty years earlier.

  “But will the president read my letter?” my mother asked doubtfully.

  “Oh, yes. I think so.” The White Fox smiled.

  As well as being a successful litigator, Dr. Safranek had also been a successful ladies’ man. He had maintained good relationships with his ex-lovers, and the information network he built up over the years was largely made up of the women he had slept with. It was no coincidence then that one of his old lovers now worked as the president’s personal secretary. Dr. Safranek had already contacted this woman and told her to look out for my mother’s letter. The plan was for the secretary to give the letter to the president when he was in a particularly bad mood.

  My mother wrote the letter and delivered it personally to the secretary, and, as Dr. Safranek hoped, Comrade Husak was enraged. He ordered the general prosecutor to investigate the case, and then forwarded it to the Supreme Court, where it was discovered that Comrade Pastorek had overlooked eight paragraphs of Social
ist law when he overturned my parents’ appeal. His judgment was not only overruled by the Supreme Court, but Comrade Husak made sure that he was forced to retire in disgrace. The case was then returned to the district court, which cheerfully authorized my parents to buy out the remaining two thirds of the house and saddled my grandmother with a massive legal bill.

  The Red Countess was shocked and furious, but she was also very frightened. She had always been afraid of my father, and the fact that he had been able to get the president to intercede on his behalf made her suspect that he still had powerful friends from the old days. She knew nothing about the White Fox or his ex-lover, but she was sufficiently intimidated by the outcome of the case to never bother my parents again.

  We had won, but the victory broke my mother’s heart. Deep down, she had always hoped to reconcile with her parents, but the court case was too big and too public, and the humiliation the Red Countess suffered was too great. It was almost ten years since the Soviet invasion, and Comrade Pastorek’s dismissal was seen as a major crack in the old guard’s armor. Many important party members were angry at my grandmother for allowing a private dispute to resolve itself so badly, and her untouchable status in Prague high society was revoked. Dinner invitations were refused, theater tickets stopped coming, and the Red Countess never forgave my mother for this. All contact was severed, and she and my grandfather whiled away their remaining years in their luxurious apartment in Old Town Prague. All the letters my mother wrote were returned unopened, and on the rare occasions when they would meet in town, my grandparents would walk away in silence.

  A few weeks after we had won the case, I was playing with Barry in the garden when I heard the sound of a truck in our street. Our street was very narrow, so the truck had been forced to turn around at the bottom of the hill and reverse all the way up the street to our house. Barry and I ran to the front gate and watched as two men in overalls jumped out of the cab and unlatched the flatbed door. One of them tooted the horn while the other lit a cigarette, and after a while Mr. and Mrs. Nedbal came outside. They were carrying big canvas bags filled with clothing, which they hauled over to the truck while the two men in overalls stood around and watched.