The Twelve Little Cakes (27 page)

“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 mother 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.”

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.