Read Online The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery - Free Book Online

a plunging neckline that accentuated her enormous cleavage. She was short and energetic, and the first thing I noticed was the bright orange lipstick she was wearing. She also wore a thick bracelet with lots of clanking charms, and I watched with fascination as she rattled across the room and threw her arms around my dad, stamping his face with her orange lips.
    â€œJarda! My boy!” she exclaimed, in what I would later learn was a North Moravian “short beak” accent. “I am so very please for you! You have win this most difficult court case and now the house has been return to your family!”
    She stepped to the side and smiled radiantly.
    â€œAnd I don’t believe you have meet my fiancé, Mr. Doskar?”
    A balding man with a deeply wrinkled face appeared behind her and blushed as he shook my father’s hand. “How do you do?” he nodded bashfully, and I noticed that his teeth were yellow and brown.
    â€œKlara! Come here my darling!” the woman shrieked, abandoning the men and rushing over to my sister. Before my sister could protest, the woman grabbed her head and pushed her face between her breasts. “How much I have miss you!”
    Her enormous bosom heaved with emotion while my sister struggled to catch her breath, and then the woman’s eyes widened as she saw me hiding in the corner. She pushed Klara briskly to the side, then came over and swept me up off the floor. She plastered my face with orange kisses.
    â€œAren’t you a pretty little girl!” she told me. “Almost as pretty as I, when I am your age.” She put me back on the ground, nodded in my mother’s direction, and went to say hello to Mr. Poloraich.
    â€œWho was that?” I asked my mother.
    â€œThat’s your grandmother,” my mother said. “Her name is Hilda.”
    â€œMy grandmother? I thought her name was Kveta!”
    â€œKveta is my mother,” she told me. “Hilda is your father’s mother. She’s your other grandmother.”
    â€œI have another grandmother?” I shook my head in amazement.
    â€œI’m afraid so,” my mother sighed.
    â€œBut why didn’t anyone tell me about her?” I asked. “I want a grandmother! I want someone to tell me stories.”
    â€œI don’t think Hilda has time to tell you stories, Trumpet,” my mother said. “She’s very busy and doesn’t even have much time for your father these days. This is the third time we have seen her since you were born. She doesn’t come to visit very often.”
    â€œWhy not?” I asked.
    â€œI think she’s having too much fun,” my mother replied.
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    MY FATHER’S FAMILY came from Ostrava, one of the ugliest and poorest cities in Czechoslovakia. My grandmother had been so poor when she was young, her biggest dream was to have curtains in the windows. She had been a great beauty, but had quickly married a man she didn’t love, to get away from her brutal, drunken father. The man’s name was Emil, and he was a quiet fellow who worked as an accountant in the State Iron Works. He and Hilda had two sons, and after thirty years of proletarian life in Ostrava, he died and my grandmother moved to Prague and reinvented herself as a Socialist businesswoman. She ran a popular buffet at the Florenc bus station, and made a lot of money selling little cakes and sausages and watered-down booze. She was very popular in the transport community, dating many bus and train drivers in the years following my grandfather’s death. But my dad had a hard time dealing with all her boyfriends and fiancés.
    Strong and capable as he was, my dad had a turbulent relationship with his mother, perhaps due to the fact that they were so similar. Hilda was also a wheeler-dealer, and she was used to getting her own way by any means necessary. I watched as she circulated through the party with old Mr. Doskar trotting behind her.