The Twelve Little Cakes (6 page)

THE ROOF

MRS. NEDBAL'S SLY REMARKS in the bathroom were more serious than I ever could have known. The following April, my parents went to the Supreme Court to try to stop the Red Countess from throwing us out. Even though one-third of the house legally belonged to my mother, the Red Countess had used her political connections to scare a number of judges into ruling in her favor.

She hired two expensive attorneys to build a case against my parents, and employed the Nedbals to eavesdrop on their conversations, both on the phone and through the walls.

The Red Countess maintained that my parents were conspiring against the Socialist state, and wanted to disinherit my mother from the property her Communist grandfather had left her. It was a long and ugly battle. My parents had already lost in the district, regional, and city courts of Prague, and knew that if their appeal to the Supreme Court was unsuccessful, not only would they be evicted but they would also be ruined by their obligation to pay my grandmother's legal expenses. Realistically, my parents had no chance, and everyone knew it. Mrs. Nedbal's smile was even sharper than usual, and my parents took to whispering in the house and sending me outside to practice my skiing. I became very good on my little yellow skis, but my parents were too distracted to watch me.

We needed a miracle, and a miracle appeared out of the blue one evening as my father was driving his regular taxi route through Prague. He was hailed by an old man outside Charles University. The man turned out to be the legendary attorney Dr. Safranek, who was known as the “White Fox” in legal circles, due to the fact that he hardly ever lost a case. He was very old and didn't accept clients anymore, but he listened to my dad's story and gave my father his card. The following day, my parents went to his office in a desperate attempt to persuade him to represent them. After their last appeal, their lawyers had resigned and told them that their attempt to keep the house was hopeless. Dr. Safranek knew exactly who the Red Countess was, and he wasn't very optimistic. But he took another look at my mother and saw her lovely Mona Lisa smile and, against his better judgment, he decided to defend her.

“Come back in a week. I'll sniff around and see what I can come up with,” he told my parents.

Dr. Safranek had no illusions about Communist justice. He knew that the only way to win the case would be to play the same kind of game my grandmother was playing. The Red Countess was a big fish, and the best way to get rid of a big fish was to find an even bigger fish to eat her. Through his private information network, he discovered that Comrade Pastorek, the judge who had thrown my parents' appeal out of the city court, was a man with a lot of powerful enemies, and he came up with a cunning strategy that had nothing to do with the legal merits of the case.

Comrade Pastorek had been a judge in the time of Stalin, and had sent thousands of people to Communist “reeducation” camps in the late forties and fifties. Back in those days, it was not only dissidents and intellectuals who were sent to these camps, but also important Communist officials who were routinely purged to destabilize their power. Many of these officials were rehabilitated after Stalin's death, and a few of them even regained their political status. The most famous rehabilitated politician at the time (and who happened to have been sent to prison by Comrade Pastorek) was none other than Comrade Gustav Husak, the president of Czechoslovakia.

When my mother returned to Dr. Safranek's office the following week, the White Fox suggested that she write a letter to the president explaining the situation and pointing out that the judge who had ruled in the Red Countess's favor was the same judge who had sent him to prison twenty years earlier.

“But will the president read my letter?” my mother asked doubtfully.

“Oh, yes. I think so.” The White Fox smiled.

As well as being a successful litigator, Dr. Safranek had also been a successful ladies' man. He had maintained good relationships with his ex-lovers, and the information network he built up over the years was largely made up of the women he had slept with. It was no coincidence then that one of his old lovers now worked as the president's personal secretary. Dr. Safranek had already contacted this woman and told her to look out for my mother's letter. The plan was for the secretary to give the letter to the president when he was in a particularly bad mood.

My mother wrote the letter and delivered it personally to the secretary, and, as Dr. Safranek hoped, Comrade Husak was enraged. He ordered the general prosecutor to investigate the case, and then forwarded it to the Supreme Court, where it was discovered that Comrade Pastorek had overlooked eight paragraphs of Socialist law when he overturned my parents' appeal. His judgment was not only overruled by the Supreme Court, but Comrade Husak made sure that he was forced to retire in disgrace. The case was then returned to the district court, which cheerfully authorized my parents to buy out the remaining two thirds of the house and saddled my grandmother with a massive legal bill.

The Red Countess was shocked and furious, but she was also very frightened. She had always been afraid of my father, and the fact that he had been able to get the president to intercede on his behalf made her suspect that he still had powerful friends from the old days. She knew nothing about the White Fox or his ex-lover, but she was sufficiently intimidated by the outcome of the case to never bother my parents again.

We had won, but the victory broke my mother's heart. Deep down, she had always hoped to reconcile with her parents, but the court case was too big and too public, and the humiliation the Red Countess suffered was too great. It was almost ten years since the Soviet invasion, and Comrade Pastorek's dismissal was seen as a major crack in the old guard's armor. Many important party members were angry at my grandmother for allowing a private dispute to resolve itself so badly, and her untouchable status in Prague high society was revoked. Dinner invitations were refused, theater tickets stopped coming, and the Red Countess never forgave my mother for this. All contact was severed, and she and my grandfather whiled away their remaining years in their luxurious apartment in Old Town Prague. All the letters my mother wrote were returned unopened, and on the rare occasions when they would meet in town, my grandparents would walk away in silence.

A few weeks after we had won the case, I was playing with Barry in the garden when I heard the sound of a truck in our street. Our street was very narrow, so the truck had been forced to turn around at the bottom of the hill and reverse all the way up the street to our house. Barry and I ran to the front gate and watched as two men in overalls jumped out of the cab and unlatched the flatbed door. One of them tooted the horn while the other lit a cigarette, and after a while Mr. and Mrs. Nedbal came outside. They were carrying big canvas bags filled with clothing, which they hauled over to the truck while the two men in overalls stood around and watched.

“Hello, Mr. Nedbal. Hello, Mrs. Nedbal,” I said. “What are you doing?”

The Nedbals didn't smile. They didn't say anything. They threw their bags into the back of the truck and glared at me as they returned to the house. I cautiously followed them in. I could hear my mother in the kitchen, but I went upstairs and pretended to go to the bathroom to see what the Nedbals were doing. Both of their doors were open and I could see inside their apartment for the very first time. Their living room was very messy, and I was startled by Otik, the Nedbals' son, who was helping them move out. I was very frightened of Otik. He was in his mid-twenties and had a glass eye that always seemed to glare at me, no matter where I stood. He picked up a chair and headed toward me, so I dashed into the bathroom and waited for him to go away.

“Are you really leaving?” I asked Mrs. Nedbal, once Otik had disappeared downstairs.

“That's right,” she replied bitterly. “We're out on the street. Who knows or cares what will happen to us? Certainly not your father. He won his case. That's all that matters to him.”

She picked up a cardboard box and carried it briskly from the room.

I hovered around the bathroom and watched until Otik eventually announced that they were ready to leave, and when I poked my head around the bathroom door, the apartment was empty. I slipped into the Nedbals' bedroom and stood on my toes to look out of their window. They had a much better view of the valley than we did. Their two rooms were slightly smaller than ours, but I thought they were actually much nicer, even though they were very dirty. There were cockroaches in the kitchen cupboards, and the walls were brown with grease. I picked my way through the trash on the floor and found a brand-new oven mitt in the corner of the kitchen. I examined the mitt and slipped it on my arm. It was bright green and came all the way up to my elbow. Suddenly, I heard the sound of the truck again in the street, and I ran to the window and watched the Nedbals drive away. They were sitting on their couch in the back of the flatbed and they didn't look very happy. I waved good-bye with the mitt, but they didn't wave back.

I decided to take the mitt downstairs and ask my mother if I could keep it. It was like a big green puppet, and if I moved my thumb and fingers, I could make the mitt talk.

“Hello!” I said to the mitt.

“Ahoj!”
the mitt said in a funny, high-pitched voice.

I ran out of the Nedbals' apartment and was trotting down the stairs, when I stopped in amazement on the first floor. The big door opposite my parents' bedroom was open, and I could hear the sound of someone moving around inside. It was as though our house was slowly coming to life. I tiptoed nearer and listened. The heavy shuffling definitely didn't belong to any members of my family, and my heart leaped to my throat as I realized that my grandmother must have come back for her furniture. I summoned up all my courage and peeked around the door.

My grandmother's room was lavishly furnished. There were three large, elaborately framed paintings on the walls and plush red carpet on the floor. Most of the furniture had been covered with sheets, but I could tell that everything was expensive and nice. It was as though I had discovered a secret room in a castle.

At the far end of the room, an old, plump woman was removing some dusty books from an even dustier bookcase and packing them into a cardboard box. Her gray hair was rolled up in a bun, and she was humming quietly as she worked. She was the spitting image of the grandmother from Ms. Nemcova's book. After a while, she turned and saw me in the doorway.

“You must be Dominika,” she said gently.

The old woman had blue eyes and a melodic voice, and I ran into the room and threw my arms around her knees.

“Are you my grandmother?” I asked her.

The old woman looked down at me with astonishment.

“No,” she said. “I'm your Auntie Mary. But I know your grandmother very well.”

“Do you?” I asked. “What is she like? Is she nice?”

“Of course she's nice,” the old lady smiled. She bent down to rummage in one of the boxes, and pulled out a leather-bound album.

“Here,” she said. “This is your grandmother Kveta in front of the National Museum.”

The photograph was a black-and-white image of a lady wearing a fur coat and a hat. She looked very dignified and important, but her face was quite fat and she had a double chin. Her mouth was set in an imperious smile, but she didn't look very happy, even though she was well-dressed and standing on the steps of a beautiful building.

“That's my grandmother?” I said incredulously.

Auntie Mary must have heard the disappointment in my voice, because she closed the photo album and put it back in the box. There was a little antique table next to the bookcase, and on top of the table was a pink Duralex glass. Auntie Mary picked up the glass and showed it to me.

“This is a very special glass,” she said. “It will never break, even if you drop it on the floor. Would you like to have it?”

“Yes, please,” I nodded enthusiastically.

She gave me the glass, then she took my hand and led me downstairs. She knocked on the kitchen door and my mother opened it. There was a long, embarrassed pause.

“Good afternoon, Auntie,” my mother said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No, no,” the old woman replied, and I noticed that her voice was trembling. “I just came down to tell you that it would be better if you could keep your little girl out of our room until I finish packing. I have a lot of work to do, and I'd really like to finish before it gets dark.”

“Of course,” my mother said.

Auntie Mary nodded, and went back upstairs to my grandmother's room. My mother watched her leave, and a look of longing appeared on her face.