The Twelve Little Cakes (23 page)

The following morning, my father paid Mrs. Bendova three thousand crowns for Barry's dinner, which turned out to be the last big meal of his career. For the whole month of January, he lay in Mr. Kozel's apartment and failed to recover from the cold he caught on the mountain. I would visit him every day after ballet, but he became progressively thinner in spite of my attempts to nurse and feed him, and whenever I pressed my ear to his chest, it sounded as though he had bagpipes instead of lungs. By the middle of February, he was too sick to eat the food or the medicine we had bought him, and we had no choice but to take him to the animal hospital in Prague. My father wrapped him in a blanket and carried him up to the garage, and let him ride in the front seat, like old times. We drove quickly to the hospital and carried him straight into the surgery to be examined by one of the best dog-men in the city.

“Look, it's Bohousek!” I heard somebody whisper as we carried Barry through the waiting room.

“Are you kidding?” someone else whispered back. “Bohousek was huge. This dog is all skin and bones.”

My eyes filled with tears and I followed my dad into the surgery.

“All right, old fellow,” the vet said as he motioned my dad to put Barry on the table. “Let's have a look at you then.”

I was frightened yet hopeful as I watched the vet examine Barry. He was an older man with a halo of white hair, and he seemed very competent as he examined Barry's eyes and throat with a penlight and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. But when he took the stethoscope off, his expression was very grave. He turned and muttered something to my dad, and my father swallowed heavily and lifted Barry's head up so that he could look the old dog directly in the eyes. They stared into each other's eyes for a long while, and then my father nodded calmly. I could see though that he was very upset. He threw his big miner's arms around my shoulders.

“We're going to have to put Barry to sleep,” he told me.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Will it hurt?”

“No,” my dad replied. “He won't feel a thing.”

He told me to keep stroking Barry's paws while the vet pulled a vial from a glass cabinet, broke its neck, and filled a syringe. My dad sat on the edge of the table and put Barry's head in his lap, then he nodded at the vet, who quickly plunged the needle into Barry's neck. My father lovingly scratched his famous dog behind the ears while I stroked his paws, and we watched his eyelids grow heavier and heavier until he finally closed them.

Then the wheezing stopped and Barry lay still.

My father thanked the vet, and then he took me by the hand and led me out of the surgery. We walked through the hospital and down to the car park. I was so overwhelmed by what had just happened, I wasn't able to cry. We climbed into our Skoda and drove back to Cernosice, and as we followed the Berounka River home to our little valley, I turned to look out of the rear window, half expecting to see Barry's trailer bumping along behind us. Huge wet snowflakes fell from the sky like dandelions. It was the last snow of the winter, and while I knew that the snow would soon melt and leaves would suddenly appear on all the trees, I also understood that my three fairy godmothers wouldn't be coming home that summer. They and Barry had gone away forever.

I stared helplessly at the road behind the car, watching the trees and houses receding into the distance as the tears finally spilled down my cheeks. My three old friends and my dog were gone, and no matter how much I loved them, no matter how much I missed them, there was nothing I could do to bring them back.

For this is the way it works in life, as opposed to fairy tales. Time marches on, turning our hopes and wishes into memories.

THE PUNCHER

THE THREE THOUSAND CROWNS we had to pay Mrs. Sokolova's daughter put us in a difficult position. We were broke again, and my father was determined to finish the house that summer. The exposed brickwork needed to be covered, and he had already ordered materials to build an internal corridor from the garage to the living room. The materials were due at the end of April, and since Barry's eating spree had cleaned out our savings, his choices were to postpone the work for another year or sell the chalet and put the money into the house. We were heartbroken when he decided to sell the cottage earlier than planned, but he argued that since Barry was the unofficial hero of the mountains, the place wouldn't have been the same without him.

“Every time I'd go to ski, I'd just imagine that big, silly dog sitting on my shoulders,” he sighed. “Poor old Barry. I really do miss him.”

“I miss him, too,” I agreed. “But I still wish we didn't have to sell the chalet.”

“Right now, it's either the house or the chalet,” my dad said firmly. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, but if we can get the corridor and the facades out of the way this year, we can start looking around for other cottages later. I don't know about you, but I'm sick of walking through a mud pile every time I go to the garage.”

In the end, he sold the chalet to a well-known actor for more than three times the price he had paid, and the rest of the year was spent in a frenzy of construction. On the days that I didn't have ballet and so didn't go to work with my mother, I made sandwiches for the workers, and sometimes even helped them shovel sand into the two cement mixers my dad kept in continuous rotation. I made a lot of sandwiches that year and fed a large collection of willing and unwilling workers, the latter being the many boys from the neighborhood who came to visit my sister.

Klara had recently turned fifteen, and while she had inherited our mother's slim and willowy figure, her genes had also conspired to endow her with a pair of our grandmother Hilda's enormous breasts. She found herself receiving a lot of attention from the boys who had previously ignored her because of my father's bad status. My sister may have been an enemy of the state but she was also one of the prettiest girls in Cernosice, and as her breasts swelled and the interest in her swelled with them, she wasted no time in transforming herself from a shy outsider into the village bombshell.

In 1980, the year in which her breasts became truly huge, my sister's early attempts at self-reinvention were actively hindered by my dad. My father was investing all his money in the house, so buying Klara nice clothes was very low on his list of priorities. But more frustrating, whenever a boy would come over to ask Klara out on a date, my dad would immediately put him to work.

“Ah, you're here to see my daughter,” he would growl. “Grab a spade and throw some cement in this foundation trench, will you? When you're done, I'll tell her you're here.”

The boy would reluctantly start to help my father in the yard, and many hours would pass before my sister was summoned. Sometimes, if my father didn't like the look of him, my sister wouldn't be summoned at all, and the only thing the young man would receive for his troubles was one of my messy, homemade sandwiches. Needless to say, it was only a matter of time before the local boys started avoiding our house like the plague.

In the early months of summer, Klara made an already difficult working environment even more difficult by throwing regular tantrums, slamming doors, and locking herself in the bathroom for hours at a time. After it became apparent that this wasn't going to stop my father from treating her young suitors as anything other than a handy source of unpaid labor, she retaliated by squeezing herself into the tightest clothes she could find and spreading mascara around her eyes in the “raccoon look” that was very popular in Prague. She teased her hair so that it stood on end, and perfected a number of haughty facial expressions that would have served her well at the local discotheque had she been allowed to visit it. Unfortunately, the disco was at the Hotel Kazin, so my dad had forbidden Klara to go there on the (not unreasonable) grounds that it would make it a lot harder to keep track of all the people who were informing on us. Throughout the five years it took us to reconstruct our house, scarcely a month would pass without a National Committee delegation arriving on our doorstep to investigate some anonymously made claim about the legitimacy of my father's building permit or the source of his materials. The license plate of every delivery truck was religiously taken down and reported, often by several neighbors at a time, and people were always complaining about the unorthodox hours he kept as a taxi driver. The way my father saw it, the kids who went to the Rotten pub disco all lived with their parents, and my sister could easily be pumped for information, deliberately or unwittingly. To Klara's chagrin, not only was she not allowed to go to the disco, but my dad also imposed an early curfew on her, and it went without saying that she was expected to spend most of her free time working on the house with the rest of us. Her early experiments with hair and makeup were therefore confined to our backyard, where she would mix cement and work on her haughty expressions. But it was also around this time that my father came up with an unusual money-saving scheme that gave my sister her first means of liberation.

My dad had met a woman who lived on the other side of our hill, and it turned out she was running a small farm on her property. The woman's name was Mrs. Backyard, and she was the wife of a very prominent gynecological surgeon who was one of the best cancer specialists in the country. Despite the deprivatization of the medical profession (which was single-handedly overseen by the Red Countess in the fifties and sixties), good doctors could command a lot of money under communism by offering their services under the table to whomever could afford them. While the rank and file tended to die on operating tables with astonishing frequency, the party elite privately engaged the best of the doctors whose practices they had collectivized, which resulted in the creation of a medical elite devoted to keeping the party elite in good health. Dr. Backyard was the gynecologist of their choice, so when he wasn't operating on the wives of high-ranking party members, he could usually be found in the Slovakian mountains shooting deer with their husbands. He kept his practice (and, word had it, many mistresses) in Prague, and rarely came out to Cernosice where his wife and family lived. Dr. Backyard's only interest in the farm his wife was running out of her own initiative was the family of badger dogs he had instructed her to breed. Badger dogs are small, ferocious dachshunds that are valued highly by hunters, and Mrs. Backyard had over twenty on her farm, along with three horses, three cows, two peacocks, two pigs, countless cats and chickens, and a goat. It was an unusual farm, and it provided the inspiration for my father's unusual money-saving scheme, which was hatched the morning he drove home from Prague and saw Mrs. Backyard carrying a feed bag up the hill. He offered her a lift home and was surprised to learn that she was milking her own cows.

“Just out of interest, what's the difference between milk straight from the cow and the milk you buy in shops?” he had asked.

“The milk in the shops is pasteurized, but it's also full of preservatives,” Mrs. Backyard explained. “The secret to really good milk is to get your cows to calve every year. The more calves they have, the better the quality of their milk. In the milk cooperatives, the cows have few calves, they don't go outside as much as they should, and their feed is full of chemicals and steroids.”

“Can you pasteurize milk yourself?” my dad asked.

“Of course,” Mrs. Backyard told him. “You just pour it into a large pot and heat it to seventy-two degrees Celsius to kill the microbes. All the cream floats to the surface, which is handy if you want to churn your own butter.”

“I see,” my father said thoughtfully.

When he arrived home, he was carrying a large enamel pot in one hand and a pail full of Mrs. Backyard's milk in the other. Klara was at school, and my mother was off to work, so it was my job to help my dad pasteurize the milk and churn the cream into butter, which, like most of the projects he embarked upon, turned out to be a lot harder than it looked.

“That went well,” he said cheerfully after several hours. “I think we can do this on a regular basis.”

My arm ached from stirring the cream with a wooden spoon, and it was hard to determine whether we had indeed heated the milk to 72°C, but we did have butter and we did have fresh milk, and the milk, I had to admit, tasted much better than the milk we bought in plastic bags down at the local grocery store.

“How will we get the milk, Dad?” I asked. “Will the lady with the cows bring it over?”

“No, we'll send Klara across the hill,” he replied. “She can carry the milk home in the pail, and then we can pasteurize and bottle it here in the kitchen. Not only is it healthier, it's also much cheaper, and if we play our cards right, Mrs. Backyard might also sell us some fresh bacon every winter!”