The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

  “That ’s . . . that’s great!” My sister blushed. “What can I get you? Hey, Hilda, look who’s here!”

  My grandmother looked up from her cash register, and it took her a few moments to place us.

  “Ah, Jana!” she said finally. “How surprise I am to see you!”

  “I bet,” my mother agreed. “I see you’re selling more than just food.”

  “Of course,” Hilda replied smoothly. “May I offer you a glass of wine?”

  “No, thank you,” my mother shook her head. “It’s a little early in the day for drinking, don’t you think?”

  The two women glared at each other while my sister retreated to the far side of the counter, but before things were able to get completely out of hand, I stood up on my tiptoes so that Hilda could see me.

  “Ahoj, Grandma!” I called out. “Guess what?”

  “Why, it’s little Dominika!” Hilda was grateful for the diversion. “What is it, sweetie?”

  “I think I got into the National Ballet Preparatory School,” I told her. “I danced all by myself in front of the judges!”

  “Really? That’s wonderful!” my grandmother smiled. “It sound like it might be a call for a celebration. Why don’t you come here and I’ll give you a treat?”

  “Yes, please!” I said eagerly.

  I started to push my way through the crowd, but before I made it around the side of the counter, my mother’s hand landed firmly on my arm.

  “I think we might keep going,” she told Hilda and me. “We just dropped by to see how you are doing. And now we’ve seen,” she added ominously.

  “Suit yourself,” Hilda shrugged.

  “But Mum!” I cried. “I’d like a little cake. I’m hungry!”

  “I’ll buy you some fruit,” my mother replied. And before I could argue, she took my hand and pulled me away from all the delicious food my sister was selling. I couldn’t believe it. There were so many cakes at Hilda’s buffet, and they all looked much nicer and more exotic than the little cakes at our local bakery. She even had the hard-to-find cakes, like the swan and the puncher, which was a sponge cake soaked in punch. I could see that my mother was angry at Hilda for letting Klara dress so provocatively, but I was terribly upset that she had declined Hilda’s offer for me. I didn’t have nice clothes like Klara and I hardly ever got to eat little cakes or sweets, and now it suddenly turned out that my sister was working at a place where there were better cakes than the ones in Cernosice, and even then I still wasn’t allowed to have one. It really didn’t seem fair. To add insult to injury, my mother took me to a fruit stand and bought me the same stringy, bitter Cuban orange she always bought me as a treat. I really hated these oranges.

  I ate it sullenly as we rode the train home in silence.

  THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS were spent in an uproar. My mother was furious at my sister’s “immorality,” and our family dinners were tense and formal affairs. My dad’s cheerful optimism had no effect on either party, and around the time of my birthday, we were both beginning to think that the rift between Klara and my mother might never be mended. But then two things combined to provide a strange resolution: my mother received a phone call from Mrs. Sprislova, and my sister began to complain of a pain in her spine.

  Mrs. Sprislova’s phone call was both encouraging and daunting. She had spoken to Mrs. Saturday, and the word from the auditioning committee was that my improvisational dancing had been viewed very favorably, but there were serious concerns about my height and my weight. The height issue was something that could resolve itself later. I would either grow or I wouldn’t. But the weight issue was something Mrs. Saturday suggested we look into immediately. I wasn’t fat by any means, but I was broad-shouldered and muscular, and according to the Russian height-to-weight ratio the preparatory school was working from, my body was unsuitable for ballet. Mrs. Saturday had said that she would see what she could do, but she strongly suggested that I try to lose as much weight as possible before the start of the school year.

  My mother thanked Mrs. Sprislova for the news, and she had just put down the phone when my dad and Klara returned from Prague where they had spent the day consulting a specialist about my sister’s back problems. The specialist had run many tests and concluded that Klara’s back pains were caused by bad posture on account of her large breasts growing larger as a result of the extra weight she had gained at the buffet. In his opinion, Klara needed to lose eight kilograms, which was roughly twice the amount Mrs. Saturday wanted me to lose.

  “Well, that settles it,” my mother said decisively. “It looks like I’m cooking light meals from now on.”

  “For everyone?” my dad asked nervously.

  “Of course. It’s not fair to expect Klara and Dominika to cut down on their food while we are eating heartily. The only fair thing to do is put the whole family on a diet.”

  My dad and Klara looked at each other in alarm. Whenever my mother set her mind on doing something, she could be counted on to keep going long after everyone else was desperate to stop.

  “What do you think, Trumpet?” she smiled. “Shall we try and lose some weight together?”

  “Yes!” I said excitedly. “We can eat lots of salad and get very very thin, and maybe I’ll grow taller, too, so that I can reach the bar in Mrs. Saturday’s studio. I’d like that very much!”

  “I bet you would,” my sister groaned.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, my mother’s diet really affected only my mother and me, as we were the only ones who stayed on it. My sister would visit Hilda’s buffet before and after school, and my dad snacked at the various taxi stands in Prague. We would get up in the mornings and eat the bland hot cereals my mother prepared, and then my dad and Klara would hurry away to eat their real breakfasts in town, leaving me to count the hours until lunch, when my mother would serve such delicacies as half a cauliflower in tomato sauce or a plate of dry lettuce. On the days when I would accompany her to work, she would prepare our ham-and-cheese sandwiches using a special kind of low-fat cheese that tasted like wax, and we stopped visiting the little bakery in Mala Strana, which made me very sad. The fridge was always empty and the pantry door was always locked, and sometimes I was so hungry I would chew the uncooked spaghetti my mother kept in a jar. My father would sneak food home from Prague on the days when he was looking after me at home, but I would always be helping him in the yard, and the work made me even hungrier than usual.

  The worst part of being hungry was that it took the fun out of dancing.

  I’d put on my Swan Lake record and practice my steps in my bedroom, but my tummy would be grumbling the whole time. In the end I would give up and go outside to either forage for nuts and wild berries in the forest (the forest was full of food, it turned out), or carry my pails to Mrs. Backyard’s farm a couple of hours early. After I had patted her dogs and filled my pails, I would carry the milk to the front gate and surreptitiously drink half of it. Then I spent the rest of the day making a tour of the neighborhood, dropping in on the families of my friends, usually around the time they were having afternoon tea.

  By the time Mrs. Sprislova arranged for Mrs. Saturday to weigh me privately, I had indeed lost three kilos, and I was delirious with joy as I thought this would mean the end of my mother’s diet. I spent the next couple of days dancing with renewed enthusiasm until I realized that the reduced meals were not going to stop.

  I didn’t think I could stand it another day.

  “I’m hungry!” I complained to my mum as she served me another plate of lettuce. “Ever since you put Klara and me on that stupid diet, I’m hungry all the time!”

  “There, there, Little Trumpet,” my mother said soothingly. “I know it’s very difficult, but you’ll have to watch your weight if you’re going to dance in Swan Lake. Otherwise, Mr. Slavicky won’t be able to lift you above his head, will he?”

  “I guess not,” I mumbled. “But I miss little cakes!”

  “You still want to be a dancer, don’t you?” my moth
er suddenly became serious.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Because I’ve just received a letter from Prague.”

  I looked up in surprise, and she pulled an envelope from the pocket of her apron. She opened it up and handed me the letter inside.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “It’s from the auditioning committee,” she told me. “You’ve been accepted to study at the preparatory school next year.”

  “Really?” I cried. “I got in?”

  “Yes, you got in,” my mother smiled.

  I jumped up and down and began to dance around the kitchen, laughing with happiness and relief. My dream had come true. I had made the first step in the long and difficult journey to become a professional ballet dancer. I may have been an outsider, but I was on my way to the National Theater.

  “Don’t get too excited,” my mother said sternly. “Now that you’ve gotten in, you’re going to have to watch your weight even more than before. Which means an even stricter diet and lots and lots of exercise. You understand this, don’t you, Trumpet?”

  I let out a deep sigh.

  “Yes, Mum,” I said. “I understand.”

  seven

  THE LITTLE INDIAN

  AS IT TURNED OUT, my mother didn’t have to worry too much about my diet. Our summer vacation would solve the weight-loss problem with unexpected efficiency. Our family went on holidays to Pisek, the town my father used to visit as a boy, and we rented a room from an old woman with ten cats. The woman’s name was Mrs. Nova, and her house was near the banks of the Otava River, which were overflowing with campers from Prague. The local pubs were packed to the rafters and the air smelled faintly of rotten apples. It was August 21, 1981, the thirteenth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the town was decorated with flags in celebration. Sausages sizzled on barbecues, and the radio played love songs. Everyone was having a wonderful time.

  We were on holiday because my dad had finally been fired from his job driving taxis. At the end of his shift one evening, two secret policemen in gray suits were waiting for him in the dispatch office, to tell him that taxi drivers were now required to become STB informers.

  “Given your papers and record, comrade engineer, we assume you wouldn’t be interested in working for us,” the policemen had smiled. Then they stopped smiling and confiscated my dad’s license.

  This kind of thing happened regularly to my father. Somewhere in the Ministry of Interior, there was a huge dossier on his activities that was kept up to date by smiling men in gray suits, and he had been fired from over thirty jobs since the Russian invasion. The secret police hated my dad for many reasons, but one of the things that infuriated them most was that whenever they tried to break his spirit, they usually achieved the opposite effect. My father was the kind of person who would be nervous about losing a job when he had one, but as soon as he was fired, he would become defiantly cheerful and take us out to dinner with what little money he had.

  “The good thing about hitting the bottom is that you can’t fall any farther,” he would declare. “From here, the only way is up!”

  The problem with my father’s optimism was that it often flew in the face of reality. When he lost his taxi license, he packed us off on holiday the very next day, and we arrived in Pisek to discover that all the good houses had already been rented. Mrs. Nova’s was the best we could find, and it was a shabby building at the end of a shabby street. The rent was cheap, but so was Mrs. Nova. There wasn’t any soap or hot water, which proved to be disastrous.

  The week had passed slowly. My parents would relax in the house until midday, while my sister would dash outside the second the sun rose. She would throw on her bikini and trot down to the river, where the local boys swarmed around her like wasps as she reclined on a towel and rubbed suntan lotion into her massive cleavage. Like most of her clothes, Klara’s bikini was several sizes too small, but none of the boys was complaining. A few of the braver ones would grab her by the arms and legs and swing her into the river, and afterward they’d all go off for ice cream. It looked like a lot of fun, and I’d go down to the river and try to join in, but my sister and her friends weren’t interested in babysitting a six-year-old girl. As there weren’t any kids my age to play with, I had no choice but to make my own entertainment. There was an old wooden bench in Mrs. Nova’s backyard, so what I ended up doing was playing school with the cats.

  I was due to start first grade in a couple of weeks, and my mother had bought me a very nice purple dress to wear. I couldn’t wait. I had heard all about school from my sister (she didn’t like it), and I had even been to the schoolyard a couple of times, so I was pretty confident I knew what I was doing when I rounded up the cats.

  Of the ten cats that Mrs. Nova fed regularly, more than half were wild. Every day after lunch, I would bring a bowl of milk-soaked bread rolls out into the backyard, and the wild cats would come in from the fields and beat up the four house cats who were my favorite students. The poor house cats were big and fluffy, and had no chance against their thin and hungry classmates. There was one particularly mean, young tomcat whose black-and-ginger fur looked like a flannel shirt, and he took great delight in disrupting my class. Every time I tried to put him on the bench, he would hiss and try to scratch my arms. The afternoons were very hot, so the four house cats and a couple of the friendlier wild ones were happy to sprawl and fall asleep. I would pat them and tell them all the things I knew. I could count to twenty. I could write my name on a piece of paper. I could name all the colors, even purple and orange, and I knew that Prague was the capital of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, while Bratislava was the capital of the Slovak part. All in all, I was a very good teacher.

  On the last day of our vacation, I held class in the morning, bringing bread and milk out early and watching with satisfaction as the house cats licked the bowl clean. The wild cats were caught off guard by my change of routine, which meant four favorite students were able to study in peace. I had just lifted them onto the bench and was about to start the lesson, when I saw the red tomcat sneaking through the back fence with a live mouse in his mouth.

  “Hey!” I called out. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

  The tomcat dropped the mouse and pounced on it again. I ran to the fence and cornered him. He had the mouse between his teeth and his orange fur was standing on end.

  “Stop that!” I cried.

  I knelt down and tried to get him to drop the mouse.

  “Come on, kitty,” I said soothingly. “Let the poor mouse go.”

  I reached for the mouse and the cat sank a claw into my finger. I yelped with pain and grabbed the mouse by its tail, and tried to pull it out of the tomcat’s mouth. The cat hissed and scratched, but I hung on with all my might until the tail snapped and came away in my hand.

  “You naughty cat!” I sobbed. “Look what you’ve done!”

  The cat dropped the mouse and batted it around on the grass until he was satisfied that it was really dead. Then he lost interest in both of us and slunk away into the fields.

  I dug a small hole and was in the process of burying the mouse, when my mother called me in for lunch. I filled the little grave with dirt and patted it down properly, and then I walked back to the house to join my parents and sister at the dining table. A tray of roast chicken sat steaming in front of them.

  “One of the cats just scratched me!” I showed my mother.

  “Well, you should be more careful,” she scolded. “Now hurry up and wash your hands. Your lunch is getting cold.”

  I could only wash my hands in Mrs. Nova’s laundry sink, because the sink in the downstairs bathroom was too high for me to reach. There was no hot water (Mrs. Nova had turned it off ), and I patted the soap tray, reaffirming that it was empty. Mrs. Nova had hidden all the soap and laundry powder, so I had no choice but to rinse my hands in cold water and wipe them on my pants before I hurried off to lunch.

/>   At the table, I followed my father’s example and ate the chicken with my fingers. Ever since he had been buried in the Ostrava coal mines, my dad tended to eat every meal as though it might be his last. We made short work of the chicken and saved the bones for the cats, though I made sure that the red tomcat didn’t get any. Later that afternoon, we packed our bags and returned to Prague.

  But by the time we arrived in Cernosice, I was terribly sick. I ran straight to the bathroom and threw up in the sink. My mother came in to help me, then she took me to my room and tucked me up in bed.

  “You’ll feel better in the morning,” she assured me. “You’ve probably just caught a bit of sunstroke.”

  My mother was usually right, but on this occasion she was wrong. I woke up the next morning to discover that my tummy had swollen to the size of a melon. I climbed out of bed and tried to walk to the toilet, but my legs shook and I barely made it in time.

  “Mum! Help!” I cried out.

  My mother came in and put her hand on my forehead. My temperature was very high, and she could see that this was no ordinary sickness. She watched as I was wracked by a series of great heaving spasms, and quickly ran off to call Dr. Polakova, my pediatrician.

  I stayed on the toilet for the next two hours, wiping my bum with nasty Polish toilet paper. It was a particularly bad time to have diarrhea, as regular toilet paper was in short supply. The state-run paper factory had burned down the previous year, and toilet paper was so scarce, shop assistants were selling it under the counter. We had wiped our bums with newspaper for a few weeks until my dad used his connections to get his hands on some toilet paper from Poland. It was cheap and had the same waxy coating as baking paper. The sheets were slippery yet abrasive, and from constant use my bum started to bleed.

  My mother spent the morning trying to call Dr. Polakova until she found out that the doctor was on vacation and wouldn’t be back until Monday. The emergency room in Radotin was famously bad, so she decided to nurse me through the weekend herself. She made me swallow black pills that tasted like charcoal, and bathed my bum with chamomile tea. By Sunday night, my fever was even higher, and when I awoke the next morning, I was wrapped in a blanket, sitting with my mother in the car.