The Twelve Little Cakes (48 page)

“I always wanted to go to Gdansk,” my dad said cheerfully as we drove back to the Friendship Pavilion. “Solidarnosz was founded there. Lech Walesa worked in the dockyards before they threw him in prison.”

“Who is Lech Walesa?” I asked.

“He's a Polish trade union leader,” my father replied. “If there's one thing the Communists hate more than capitalists, it's workers who want to form trade unions. The Solidarity uprising happened because a bunch of dockworkers from Gdansk refused to comply with Russian shipping regulations. They thought they were being treated unfairly, and stood up for their rights. Walesa was their leader. He's a very brave man.”

“What's he doing now?” I asked.

“Well, the police have been chasing him since 1981, so he's in hiding,” my father said. He shook his head in admiration. “They've had his house under constant surveillance, and yet he still manages to make his wife pregnant every year!”

 

 

BACK AT THE FRRIENDSHIP PAVILION, my mother boiled a pot of hot water and tried to remove the toothpaste from my ears. She wrapped a piece of cotton wool around a match and gently prodded and poked until I started to complain.

“It's never going to come out!” I said. “I'm going to have toothpaste in my ears for the rest of my life!”

“No, you won't,” my mother sighed. “You're going to have to wait until we're back in Cernosice, though. I'll take you to Dr. Polakova.”

My dad came in from the balcony where he had been drinking a celebratory glass of gin.

“I have a terrific idea,” he said. “Why don't we go to the Hotel Romance for dinner? We have enough zlotys to fix the car, have an expensive meal, and—” he slapped my mother on the bottom, “buy your mother a new summer dress!”

My mother's favorite dress had been completely ruined by two days of car pushing.

“Well, that would be nice,” my mother said. “Do you think we'll be able to find a nice dress in Poland?”

“A nice dress? We have enough zlotys to buy you an entire new wardrobe!” my father laughed.

“Can I play outside before dinner?” I asked.

“Of course,” my dad winked, pouring my mother a gin and tonic. “What a good idea! You go outside and play for a few hours and then we'll have the most wonderful meal!”

“Back at six!” my mother called out as I left.

I wandered down to the sea, looking for someone to play with. A sharp wind had made the waves choppy and there were lots of dead jellyfish washed up on the beach. Some of them were as big as pizzas and had bright purple veins running through their bodies. I stepped around them as I walked across the sand, until I encountered a group of Polish kids who were picking them up and throwing them into the sea.

I walked over and introduced myself.

“Hello! My name ith Dominika!” I said, lisping in Czech to try to make it sound Polish. “I'm on holidath from Prague. Ith it thafe to touch the jellyfith? They're not going to thting you?”

The Polish kids were very friendly. One of the boys picked up a jellyfish and turned it upside down.

“They can't sting you if you hold them like this,” he said. “But it doesn't matter, because whenever you see a jellyfish washed up on a beach, it means it's already dead. You want to throw one?”

“Yeth, pleath,” I said.

He handed me the jellyfish. It felt like I was holding a big see-through pudding.

“Now throw it so it hits the face of a wave,” the boy said. “If you do it right, it will explode like a grenade.”

I threw the jellyfish into the sea and watched it splatter against the water. It really did explode like a grenade. For the next hour and a half, the Polish kids and I gleefully blew up all the jellyfish we could find, until the one girl who owned a wristwatch announced that it was time to go home for
“kolace.”
This was very interesting.
Kolace
was the Czech for “cakes.”

“You have
kolace
?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” the Polish kids replied.

“Wow,” I said. “I'm going to have a yummy dinner ath well. My dad ith taking uth to the Hotel Romanth.”

The Polish kids were very impressed.

“Why are you lisping?” one of the boys asked me.

“I'm trying to make my Czech thound Polith,” I told him.

“Well, don't. It sounds ridiculous,” the boy said. “We can all understand you. Would you like to come and see our apartment building?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

The Polish kids lived in a big concrete
panelak
half a kilometer down the beach. I didn't think it was possible, but their house was even uglier than the Friendship Pavilion, and a lot of people lived in close proximity to each other. My new friends invited me inside, but I had to go home for dinner, so I told them that I would see them tomorrow and sprinted home to change.

At seven o'clock, my parents and I walked through the lobby of the Hotel Romance. My father was in an excellent mood and my mother looked very pretty. She wore a tight-fitting dress and a hat, and turned the heads of many German businessmen. The restaurant had high art nouveau ceilings and plush red carpet on the floors. A waiter in a white tuxedo ushered us over to our table. He wore white velvet gloves and had a napkin folded across his arm. With a flourish, he handed us the menus, which were bound in brown leather. All of the meals had French names.

I ordered the
soupe royale
and had
médaillons de jambon glacé à la Monte-Carlo
as an appetizer. For the main course, I chose the
soufflé de poisson.
A piano tinkled away in the background as the waiter uncorked an expensive bottle of wine and poured a small amount into my father's glass. My father inspected its texture against the light and made a show of tasting it. He nodded approvingly, and the waiter poured wine for both my parents as a bowl of soup materialized in front of me. It was then that we discovered the full extent of the food shortage in Poland.

The
soupe royale
was a pink cherry soup. It was served cold, and tasted horrible. I took two mouthfuls and pushed it away. The appetizer was similarly unappealing. It came in a majestic silver serving tray, and I removed the lid with anticipation, only to discover that the
médaillons de jambon
were a roll of fatty ham in aspic that reminded me of the jellyfish I had thrown into the sea. I poked it with my fork and quickly put the lid back on the tray. My parents also left their food untouched, and I noticed that many Germans weren't eating, either. It was heartbreaking, because the waiters behaved with such dignity. They were serving us the best food their kitchen could produce. The
soufflé de poisson
turned out to be a dish of mashed herring in a watery tomato sauce. It was difficult to eat, but I ate without complaint. I listened to the piano and watched the waiters fuss over the Germans, but I was secretly relieved when our waiter brought the little basket with the check, because I wanted to go home and eat some baked beans. The meal came to four hundred and eighty thousand zlotys. My father nonchalantly peeled ten notes from his tube and put them in the basket.

“Keep the change,” he told the waiter, who bowed and walked away.

“The Polish kids have cakes for dinner,” I said loudly.

“Really?” My mother looked doubtful. “I had no idea the food situation was this bad. These poor people.”

“They have cakes!” I exclaimed. “Do you think there's somewhere around here where we could get cakes?”

“Shh. Keep your voice down,” my mother said sternly.

“Excuse me, sir.” The waiter came back to our table. “I'm terribly sorry, but you've only given me two hundred and seventy-five thousand zlotys. You've probably mistaken the five thousand notes for the fifty thousand ones. This happens all the time.”

He was very apologetic. He put the little basket back onto our table and waited for my dad to recount the money.

The blood drained from my father's face. He verified that he had underpaid the bill, and then pulled the roll of zlotys from his pocket and unwrapped the little tube. He examined the money the
Wechsel
man had given him, counting the zeros on the side of the banknotes.

“Oh, dear,” he said calmly. “You're right. It is hard to tell the difference.” And as we watched, he peeled another forty-five notes from his tube and handed them to the waiter. With the tip, the meal had cost us almost all the money my father had exchanged.

Nobody spoke for a very long time.

I listened to the piano, while the cigarette in my father's hand burned down to a long stick of ash. The
Wechsel
man had used a very old technique to cheat us. Polish money was issued in multiples of thousands, and was similar to American money in that the different banknotes were the same color and size. The man with the gold teeth had put a small number of fifty thousand zloty notes on top of a large pile of five thousand zloty notes, rolling them into a tube so that the last zero was obscured. He then calmly watched my father (and me) count three million zlotys, when he had, in fact, given us less than half a million.

We were now completely broke in Poland.

My mother's eyes were very wide and her mouth began to quiver, and then she unexpectedly let out a high-pitched giggle. My father and I looked at her with amazement. She was trying not to laugh, but was soon laughing so hard that tears were streaming down her cheeks, and I couldn't help but join in. Pretty soon, my father was roaring as well. The German businessmen looked up from their tables as we left the restaurant in semihysterics, and we laughed all the way to the Friendship Pavilion. None of us mentioned the money from that moment on. We just laughed until we cried, which is the Czech way of dealing with disaster.

 

 

FOR THE REST OF OUR VACATION, we ate baked beans for lunch and pork cutlets for dinner. My mother soaked her summer dress in Ajax and washed it by hand until it was as good as new, while my father spent a lot of time in front of his car, staring wistfully at the crack in the engine. Everything had gone spectacularly wrong, but we still managed to have a good holiday. I became friends with the Polish kids and spent my afternoons throwing jellyfish into the sea, and even started speaking a little Polish. It was very similar to Czech. I would say
“Dzienkujemy bardzo”
instead of “Thank you,” and
“Dowidzenia”
whenever I had to go home for dinner. After dinner, my new friends and I would meet in a public playground near the Friendship Pavilion, and stay outside and play games until it got dark.

“Did you have cakes for dinner?” I would ask.

“Tak,”
they would reply.
“U nas kolace.”

“And you have cakes every night?” I would shake my head enviously. I was really sick of baked beans.

“Of course.” The Polish kids seemed puzzled by the question.

“I love cakes,” I said, after dropping many hints. “Do you think you could bring me one?”

The Polish kids looked very worried.

“Okay,” they agreed after conferring between themselves. “The problem is, we don't have much to bring you. We have only very little cakes.”

“A little cake would be great!” I said happily.

The following morning, I wolfed down my breakfast and ran down to the beach.

“Dzien dobry!”
I called out when I saw them. “Did you bring me a cake?

A tiny girl called Kaczya, who was even smaller than me, smiled weakly and pulled a boiled egg out of her pocket.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “This is the best we could do.”

“An egg?” I said. “I thought you would bring me
kolace.”

“
Tak jest,
we brought you what we had for
kolacja
last night,” the kids said. “
Zalujemy bardzo,
but we don't have much to eat.”

I suddenly understood that I had misheard them saying
“kolace.”
My ears were still blocked, and I realized with deep embarrassment that
kolacja
meant “dinner” in Polish. My friends were eating boiled eggs for dinner, and even so, they had brought me what little food they had.

I didn't want to offend them, so I said,
“Dzienkujemy bardzo,”
and accepted the egg. I tapped it on my forehead and started to peel it, when I suddenly had a very good idea.

“Listen,” I said. “We have tons of food at our place! Why don't you come and have lunch at the Friendship Pavilion!”

It was the Polish kids' turn to look embarrassed, but I was already leading them up the beach. I knocked on our apartment door, and my mother opened it and smiled at the pack of scrawny boys and girls behind me. I introduced my new friends and explained that I had invited them for lunch.
“Dzien dobry,”
my mother said to them in Polish. She invited them inside and told them to sit at the table, and then she opened the refrigerator and pulled out our remaining pork chops. My dad came in from the balcony and joined her in the kitchen, opening many cans of baked beans. The smell of food quickly filled the room. The Polish children were very polite. They called my father “sir” and mumbled answers to his questions, but when my mother handed them each a big plate of pork and beans, their eyes lit up and they ate with relish, telling us about their lives in Miedzyzdroje. Most of their fathers worked in the dockyards and most of their mothers were pregnant. They went to school on Saturdays and church on Sundays, and dreamed of becoming astronauts or emigrating to America. After they cleaned their plates, my mother served them a second helping, and when they had finished, my dad gave each of them a bottle of Czech beer to give to their fathers.