Part I

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1981 – 1983

Things happen.  Things you would never have dreamed of.  Things you might have thought about just maybe happening on the other side of the galaxy but you’d never imagine them happening in your own life. But they do. 

     My name is Franta. I live in Vendula’s head. Vendula is a girl who likes to daydream. She conjured me out of thin air like magic when she was just a wee little thing, and we’ve been together ever since. Our life is filled with good moments and good people, and the sum of it, we fancy, makes for quite a good tale.

Chapter one in which the family roasts a chook when Uncle Stan decides to search for greener pastures

I knew Vendula was special the moment I saw her. Clutching a ladybug in her chubby little fist, Vendula sat in the meadow full of blooming daisies. A drunken bumblebee made her laugh, and her voice, like silver bells covered with snow, chimed a quiet, pretty tune. I was enchanted and decided to stay. 

     At first, living with Vendula was plain sailing. Luck had always followed her like a puppy on a leash. A skip and a sniff and a leg up every so often, we knew where we were going. Vendula, a ballerina in a paper weight world, sailed through life as if every day was a walk through a rose garden where friends gathered like fluffy clouds. But then the summer of ‘79 rolled in and overnight things started to go pear-shaped.

     First there was puberty. It came upon us suddenly, like a runaway train, bringing boys, breasts and training bras to cause havoc amongst Vendula’s friends who bloomed alarmingly in the most obvious places while Vendula doodled with her fountain pen.

     ‘Let’s chuck a waterbomb on the footpath,’ she offered blissfully when the girls came to hang out.

     Oh, Vendula. Tsk. Tsk. You’re such a child. Smokes were lit. Heads were shaken. It seemed that a new attitude, new rules of conduct, had sprung up amongst the girls like mushrooms after rain when Vendula wasn’t looking.

     Then Sylvie, Vendula’s bestest friend ever, moved away to Cured Ham. Yes, Cured, of all places. Like a stunned pig Vendula sat there when Sylvie told her. I’m moving to Cured Ham. Vendula keeled over. You can’t be, she stammered in disbelief, but Sylvie shrugged. That’s the way it is. Sylvie moved away, leaving a hole the size of the whole world. Of course, the girls wrote a while but you know how it is. Out of sight, out of mind; the friendship died a Cured Ham death.

     To top it all, Uncle Stan defected to West Germany, causing a religious conversion in the process. True, the fashion of the day dictated that every thinking, progressive human bean make a stand against the commies; Mother, however, didn’t see it that way when Uncle Stan first called with the news in the middle of the night.   

     ‘You what?!’ Mother shouted, descending upon the telephone like a plague of locusts. ‘Dee-fected?’

     We clustered around. A hush of biblical proportions fell as with bated breath we hovered over the receiver like the three wise men over baby Jesus. Mother, for once speechless, listened to the steady flow of Uncle Stan’s words. I’m not comin’ back, sis. I’ve had a gutful of it. All them effin queues and what the fuck for? A miserable loaf of bread and a piece of cheese if you’re lucky. That’s not the way I wanna live. Fuck the communists, they can build their effin communism without me. On and on he went, venting to Mother who gradually lost all colour and sat there gaping wordlessly, as white as a ghost. Indeed, in the feeble light of the night lamp, she looked a fright with her plastered down hair, wide open mouth and bulging eyes, and for a moment she appeared to be frozen in time. Eventually, though, she began to show signs of life. She made a gesture as if she could not believe what she was hearing.  Then she made another as if she had no words to express what she was feeling. After that the stupor eased and she let him have it.

     ‘Do you realize what you’ve done to me?’ Mother screeched, shouting that Pavel was in his senior year at school, and what are the odds he won’t get into college now, and poor Vendula, she’ll have no chance of a proper education at all, will she, she’ll be lucky to punch tickets on the tram, you selfish fool!

     In this vein the conversation continued for about fifteen minutes. Vendula and I loitered while Mother and Dad argued. Well, Mother argued and Dad as usual kept calm; nevertheless, a lot of unpleasant things were mentioned before the connection was suddenly terminated. Mother began to weep. Dad stood there waiting for instructions while Vendula nurtured a vision involving a new pair of jeans she dreamed Uncle Stan would send her after he settles in and gets a job, and she was secretly pleased about Uncle Stan defecting ‘cause she was busting to get out of Pavel’s hand-me-downs. However, right then, in view of Mother’s condition (very troubled), Vendula said nothing of this desire. Meanwhile, Mother scheduled a family council for the next morning. Then we all went to bed.

     In the morning Mother broke the news to Pavel who had slept the night through and was just now waking up, drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. He took it philosophically.

     ‘Hmmm,’ Pavel hmmed without enthusiasm, looking bored. I was not surprised. Having no interest in politics or defecting uncles, this quiet teenage boy could hardly be expected to react otherwise. Still, Mother might have taken exception, but luckily she wasn’t paying attention. She was thinking of her parents, babka Zlatka and deda Anton, who had to be told of this disaster, this dreadful turn of events, this lamentable state of affairs which will prove to be our undoing, Mother orated to herself, staring gloomily into the fridge. Eventually, she took out a chicken and decided to make the announcement over lunch.

     After the nocturnal kerfuffle, telling our grandparents was relatively easy. ‘Lord, have mercy upon his soul!’ babka cried, falling to her knees when, after the chook had been devoured and the strudel not yet served, Mother, wearing a slightly constipated expression, stood up and addressed the old folk as Dearest mother and father… It was all over in two minutes.

     Babka, the poor thing, cried buckets. Her tiny figure shaking and her ovine face contorted with grief, babka cried drenching hankies, towels, and sheets. Deda, on the other hand, couldn’t have been prouder. Dry-eyed, he sat at the table sipping slivovice, his imposing corpulent self growing larger with every passing moment as he chest-puffed about his son the freedom fighter. Every now and then deda’s nose, that enormous bulbous thing hanging from his face like a good-sized cucumber, quivered and twitched as deda’s suppressed emotions got the better of him.

     In this fashion, the afternoon wore on. Babka cried, Mother fussed with her coffee and cakes in the kitchen, Pavel sat somewhere quietly uninvolved and Dad retired to the toilet with the newspaper. Deda Anton cornered Vendula in the living room where he held forth on the family history of freedom fighting, crapping mainly about his brother, known to all as Uncle Bob who, when the commies took over in 1948, had emigrated to Australia where, according to deda, he done good. Throughout this speech babka cried, Mother served hard liquor, and the kids didn’t care. After the coffee had been drunk and the strudel had been gobbled up, the family gathered to pay homage to Uncle Stan.

     The way we were going one would have thought we’d lost a truly exceptional human being; a genius of immeasurable talent, a humanitarian worthy of a Nobel Prize nomination at the very least, which, realistically speaking, was not the case at all. Truth be told, Uncle Stan was uninspiring and uninspired. His idea of a joke was to fart loudly and then blame it on Vendula. On a good day, he’d ask Pavel to pull his finger. Thus exhausting his bag of tricks, Uncle Stan would then turn to drink. The kids never gave him a thought. So now, prattling about Uncle Stan’s outstanding qualities, we stressed, most of all, his significance as the family anchor without which our lives were bound to plunge into chaos.    

     The evening ended when deda Anton, due to excessive intake of slivovice, keeled over and fell face down onto the floor, taking with him Mother’s prized possession, the cigar tree. The cigar-shaped pods of the plant exploded on impact like fireworks, showering the prostrate deda with tiny black seeds from top to bottom. Looking like a giant poppy seed bun, deda snored wedged in the doorway. Well, what can I tell you? All’s well that ends well. We tried to move him, I swear we did. We pulled him by the feet but his head bumped on the doorstep, then we tried pulling his arms but this maneuver caused uproar as deda’s pants began to slip. In the end we left him where he was and everybody went to bed.  

---

Predictably, after the festivities died down, things turned a bit more serious. Before the week was out, Mother and Dad and the old folks had some interviews at the police station regarding Uncle Stan’s departure. As customary in those circumstances, everyone was just devastated.

     ‘We’d never have guessed he could do such a thing!’ Mother, suitably appalled at Uncle Stan’s behaviour, clutched her head theatrically for the benefit of the interrogators. Bemoaning Uncle Stan’s weak moral fiber, Mother declared his conduct at odds with the strong communist tradition we’ve apparently nurtured.

     ‘Utterly incomprehensible!’ Mother wailed, proposing diminished mental capacity and citing numerous cases of it in the family. At this point, babka Zlatka, bless ‘er, inadvertently advanced the argument when she piped up about Uncle Stan’s foreign correspondence. 

     ‘What correspondence?’ Special Agent Sharp perked up, taking out his notebook.

     ‘You know,’ babka nodded to the bewildered crowd, ‘the Bulgarians.’

Interrogations that followed eventually revealed that, when in junior high, Uncle Stan exchanged letters with a Bulgarian schoolgirl, whom he met at an asthmatic children's summer camp. Despite Mother's protestations...'But they're our, the Bulgarians are on our side...' Special Agent Sharp wrote everything down. Promising to look into it, he terminated the interview. For now.

September came and with it the start of a new school year. As usual, Vendula hung out with her honorary cousin Alice. The kinship, like their relationship, was defined by its very tenuity. The girls’ family ties dated back to the golden days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Alice’s gr-gr-greatgrandad and Vendula’s gr-gr-greatgrandad had been village idiots together, their combined intellect employed to keep the geese off the village green. The girls’ relationship worked along similar lines.

     In the mornings the girls walked to school together and in the afternoons they walked back home. On the way Alice talked and Vendula listened. Frankly, it wasn’t much fun. Alice, a short fat lump of a girl with a horsey face, was conceited and a bit of a bully. She constantly talked about herself; her hair, her face, her make-up, the boys who liked her and the ones she liked, and she also talked about her clothes. Vendula walked two steps behind her, listening and nodding, and sometimes she even said something but Alice always shook her head and said: don’t start with your bullshit, Vendula, not now, listen to this, and Vendula just sighed and kept quiet.

     One day I asked her why she put up with it.

     I don’t know, Vendula replied, looking grim. It’s the way things are.

     Now it was my turn to sigh. Things can be changed, you know, I told her but Vendula just sat there looking like a small sad puppy. To cheer her up I promised her that Destiny would soon lend a hand.

     We didn’t have long to wait. The very next morning when the girls were getting ready for school, an opportunity for payback presented itself. Alice was in front of her mirror, combing her hair. Vendula was just then telling her something but Alice wasn’t paying attention. She was busy shaping her fringe. When she ordered Vendula to bring the hairspray, I noticed Alice had forgotten to take out some curlers pinned up on top of her head. Had she not whipped up her fringe into a great whirlpool of curls at the front, Alice would have easily spotted those two fat beauties perched up there, but as it was, she had no idea ‘cause she declared herself ready to go. We walked out into the corridor. Vendula and I were deliberating (I was against telling Alice, the situation had potential) when the door of the apartment directly opposite the lift opened and a tall young man emerged. At that point Vendula ceased to struggle with her conscience and we proceeded to the lifts.

     ‘How are you, girls?’ asked the tall young man, giving a dazzling smile.

     Alice beamed like a lighthouse. Turning to Vendula as if to say: see, I told you he likes me, she winked. Meanwhile the lift arrived. We entered the cabin first, with the tall young man gallantly holding the door open. Then he followed us in, closed the door and pressed the lift button. The lift shuddered, then lurched, and finally began its creaky ride down the nine floors. Throughout all this Alice kept smiling at the handsome young dude who could not take his eyes off her hairdo.

     ‘Soooo,’ the young fellow said, making a vague gesture towards Alice. ‘New trend?’         

     ‘What? This old thing?’ Alice, none the wiser, blushed, wriggling in her brand new Levi’s. The young man with the engaging smile turned slightly towards Vendula and raised his eyebrows in the way I envisioned people would. Vendula beamed. The two stood there grinning at each other until the lift touched down.   

Alice speculated on her chance all the way to school. Vendula was cautiously optimistic; maybe the young man was just being polite, she opined but Alice shushed her.  

     ‘Are you crazy?’ she snorted. ‘Didn’t you see the way he smiled at me?’   

Of course, we saw the way he smiled at her. The same sort of smirk she was getting now walking through the school gate, the school yard, the corridor and all the way to her desk. Eventually, someone took pity and tapped her on the shoulder. Alice then fled to the loo where she shrieked writhing on the tiles.          

The girls made up after school on the way home, but only after Vendula promised we’d go past Danek’s house. Danek was Alice’s latest crush, a teenage hooligan she’d been drooling over since last Monday when we discovered him sitting on a park bench, spitting on the footpath.

     ‘He’s gooorgeous,’ Alice had raved.

     ‘And so accomplished,’ I remarked before Vendula had time to do anything about it.

     Alice looked at her and frowned.

     

To read more of Cabbage, Strudel and Trams go to:

https://cabbagestrudelandtrams.blogspot.com/