The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery

compared to Ostrava, which was destroyed by the war and then ruined by the Russians. When I was a little boy, Cernosice looked like Heaven. From the moment I saw it, this was where I wanted to live.”
    â€œWhat was Ostrava like?”
    â€œIt’s a coal-mining town.There was a lot of coal in the ground that the Russians wanted, so they made our factories and mines work hard to produce it for them. After a while, it became unbearable. The trees and buildings would be covered in coal dust, and the streets would be so hot in summer, the tar would melt and stick to your shoes. You couldn’t swim in the river because it was full of chemicals, and you couldn’t walk across a bridge without holding your nose.”
    â€œThat doesn’t sound very nice,” I said.
    â€œIt wasn’t. It was a rough town full of poor people like my parents. You had to be strong to survive, and even stronger to get out. If there was one thing I knew when I was growing up, it was that I was going to get out as soon as I had the chance.”
    He finished his cigarette and sent the glowing embers floating out into the darkness.
    The sky had turned inky black, the moon and stars smothered by clouds. Dishes and cutlery clattered in the distance, and I could smell the sausages the Haseks were cooking next door. My father put a wash-cloth on his hand and gently soaped my back, and then he rinsed me, shook me dry, and wrapped me up in a towel. He helped me into my pajamas as my sister came up to take her turn in the bath. Then he went back to his wall, continuing to lay bricks in the semidarkness.
    Klara inspected the bath, dipping her hand in the water.
    â€œIt’s dirtier than usual,” she complained.
    â€œDominika has been helping me in the yard,” my dad told her.
    â€œI cleaned a pile of bricks,” I announced to her. “I’ve become very good at hitting them with a hammer.”
    â€œGreat,” my sister said. “And now the water looks like coffee.”
    â€œAt least it’s warm coffee,” my father growled. “It’s cold and black by the time I get to it.”
    Klara sighed and climbed in, while I put on my slippers and trotted down to the kitchen. My mother had just finished cooking kulajda, a traditional Czech meal of potatoes and hard-boiled eggs in white sauce. She had recently started serving our dinners on small plates to make them look bigger, and the delicious smell of the neighbors’ sausages was often quite distracting. I loved my mother’s cooking, though. She could make the tastiest of meals out of the plainest of ingredients.
    We ate dinner together, and then my father attached the TAXI sign to his car and drove away to work the night shift in Prague. Every so often, Dad’s schedule would become very frantic, and I would later learn that this was due to a small group of West Germans personally requesting him whenever they came to town. My father spoke fluent German and had dealt with many Germans during his government years, so whenever a visitor with dissident connections would come to Czechoslovakia, the network put him in touch with my dad and he would become their personal chauffeur. They paid in deutsche marks, which he could exchange on the black market, and often required him to shake off state secret security cars that were tailing them. Westerners were automatically tailed during communism. The secret police liked to lure them to hotels and photograph them in compromising situations. Dad was very familiar with the secret police, and was able to keep his German clients out of trouble.
    After he had driven away, my mother led me upstairs to my cot in the living room, the only room in the house that wasn’t under construction. It was crowded with furniture and all my mother’s books, and there was so little space, my mother and father had to sleep underneath the piano. My cot was in the middle of the room, and I would fall asleep