The Twelve Little Cakes (45 page)

“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.

 

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.

“Goodness me! Haven't you grown up!” he would say. “And what is your father up to? I keep smelling ammonia and almonds. What's going on inside your garage?”

Mr. Hasek always looked up and down the street because he wanted to avoid Mr. Simek, the other neighborhood gossip. Poor Mr. Simek had a terrible speech impediment that made him very hard to understand, and his snooping technique consisted of him coming out of his garage with a rake and pretending to rake the leaves beneath his walnut tree. He did this in all seasons, even when the snow was thick on the ground. He'd rake for a while and then suddenly pretend to see me. Then he'd shuffle over for a neighborly chat, hoping to learn what Mr. Hasek had learned.

“Hello, little girl. Haven't you grown up?” he would say. “I hear that your father has been busy building some kind of chemical factory in your garage. Is it true?”

Actually, I had no idea what he said. Apart from the speech defect, he also spoke too fast, running his words into each other. It often sounded like he was speaking Hungarian.

“
Huurgleh. Granneh? Iceland yer gargoyle magland hallelujah.
Goulash?” he would ask. Our conversations were very strange. The fortunate thing was that no matter what I told him, he could never really repeat it to anyone. Even his wife had trouble understanding him.

As Mr. Hasek left and Mr. Simek appeared, a black Tatra 613 drove up the street. The Tatra 613 was a government car, an East European Cadillac. Cars like this were only driven by high-ranking Communist officials, because no one else could afford them. They consumed so much gas, you had to fill the tank every hundred kilometers. Mr. Simek's jaw dropped as he saw the car coming, and he hurriedly raked his way back to his garden.

I jumped down from the barrel and rang the doorbell.

“Dad! Dad! This is it! They're here!” I cried.

The Tatra rumbled to a halt, a little flag with the Austerlitz coat of arms fluttering on its hood. Behind me, the garage door flew open and my family and Dr. Stein-Ein came out wearing white lab coats. A short, energetic man leaped from the car and made a huge show of kissing my mother's and sister's hands. This had to be Comrade Maxian. Despite the fact that his Tatra (and his shoes) were covered in mud from our construction site, he really did seem like an aristocrat. Two men climbed out of the car behind him, and he introduced them as Comrade Drapal and Comrade Fejk. Comrade Drapal looked like a big, sleepy bear in a gray suit, whereas Comrade Fejk reminded me of a ferret. The three men spoke in the same “long beak” dialect as Mrs. German, and I had to stop myself from giggling. Comrade Drapal made small talk with Dr. Stein-Ein, and Comrade Fejk made eyes at my sister, while in the background, Mr. Simek raked his invisible leaves and Mr. Hasek loitered in the street, struggling to memorize Comrade Maxian's plates.

“Who ares these people?” Comrade Maxian demanded. “Ares they friends of yours, or neighbors?”

“They're neighbors,” my father said. No other explanation was necessary. Everyone knew exactly what he meant.

“Well, then,” Comrade Maxian said cheerfully. “You must takes us inside and shows us this machine!”

Dr. Stein-Ein's cheeks flushed with pride as he led the comrades into the garage. He launched into a long speech about electromagnetic energy, using technical terms that no one understood. He was tiny and intense, and with his mane of white hair, he really did look like a mad scientist. He switched on the computer, and the
aparatura
came to life. Comrade Maxian put on a pair of glasses and smiled with anticipation, while my mother pulled me toward the door. My father stood beside the machine, pointing out the different kettles and tubes as the pressure slowly built inside the distillery. The thermometer climbed past seven hundred degrees, and the smell of ammonia was so strong you could taste it. Comrade Drapal collapsed into a chair and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. Comrade Fejk looked like he was going to faint. Twenty minutes later, a rich, honeylike liquid poured into a test tube at the bottom of the
aparatura.

Dr. Stein-Ein handed the test tube to Comrade Maxian.

“What we have here is an antifriction lotion capable of attracting molecules of water from the air,” he said excitedly. “By applying it to any synthetic surface, you can neutralize the antistatic charges caused by friction. Nylon threads won't snap while running through a loom, and vinyl plates in a press won't attract dust from the air!”

Comrade Maxian dipped his finger in the test tube.

“Incredible,” he said politely. “So how does we makes money with this, exactly?”

“Well, for a start, we can sell it to the textile industry as a prevention against combustion,” my father explained. “This is a serious problem in Russia. Factories burn down all the time because of the sparks generated by static electricity and friction.”

Comrade Maxian looked at the yellow goo on his hands.

“I see,” he said doubtfully.

There was an awkward pause. My mother tightened her grip on my hand while my sister unbuttoned her lab coat and started fanning herself like Marilyn Monroe.

“It's hot in here,” she moaned. “Can't anyone open the window?”

Comrade Fejk leaped to attention. He strode manfully across the laboratory, leaned forward, and reached over a row of bottles sitting in front of the window. He pulled the window open, knocking the stopper out of a large bottle of alcohol that my father had recently distilled.

“I'm so sorry!” he exclaimed. “I hopes this is not some kind of—”

His face changed.

“Good Lord,” he sniffed. “This smells like booze!”

Comrade Drapal bounced out of his chair and immediately joined his comrade at the window. Comrade Fejk lifted the bottle and inspected it against the light.

“Oh, that,” my dad said nonchalantly. He tilted his head toward the door, indicating that the neighbors might be out there listening, and then he whispered something in Comrade Maxian's ear.