DAILY BREAD

False Spring of 1968

The Prague Spring

It is dangerous to be right

when the government is wrong.
-Voltaire

'My name is Margalo,' said the bird, softly, in a musical voice. 'I
come from fields once tall with wheat, from pastures deep in fern and
thistle; I come from vales of meadowsweet, and I love to
whistle!'
-E.B. White

Once upon a time, my soul happened to love dessert more than girls. So
popular was dessert time that I never questioned Mamka's rule of eating
everything on the plate. My first taste of Mamka's chocholatte pancakes
came years before my first kiss, but it was just as sensational.
Pancakes must have the right heat. Too low, the pancake is soggy. Too
high, the butter fries black, smokes, the pancake crisps. In my Mamka's
kitchen I traveled to dreamlands where pancakes talked, I composed the
scariest stories, I deconstructed family history. For years in a state
of blissful fogginess my German auntie Ota cooked pancakes in the same
kitchen as my Mumka.

Many times upon a time I was accused of being the spoiled child in the
family who got its way. I do not remember demanding, Get me water. Get
me milk. Get me ribina and I want a pancake. And I want pancake in my
auntie Otta's plate. And I don't like that kind of soup and I don't
want to wear a bib and I want another pancake and jam. But not that
jam. And I want more water. And I am still hungry.

As a child, my parents were fond of joking that, quite unlike their
other five children, their youngest son, could eat like an entire army.
'We rather dress you, Jozko, than feed you.'
By the time I was seven, Mamka used to call me long legs. She told me I
reminded her of a May pole.

At dessert time, no one had to say, "Jozef! Look who's beside you!" Aga
seemed to be always beside me and often arguing over the size of
Mamka's chocolate pudding on my plate. My mother marked the events of
her life with dessert recipes, dishes of her own invention or
interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her
celebration, its nurture and preparation one of the outlets for her
creativity. The kitchen was not simply a workspace of mouth-watering
excitement, it was command central. You were just as likely to find
Mamka sewing, plucking feather, reading, writing, or wrapping gifts as
you were to find her cooking pirohy - pillows of pastry filled with
potato.

At washing up time, just as art students visit ancient castles to be
inspired and mystified by old masters, Aga and I liked to feast our
senses in a place where mother nature's brilliance blended in perfect
harmony with our vivid imagination. Escaping to this place was never
easy, so we often pretended not to hear Mamka calling to us from the
kitchen, "Play in our garden. Don't go into the street ..." No one
could have designed safer streets for barefooted children.

Paved and unpaved streets were the heart and soul of Vrbov. The stones
in the center of the village were the size of the human heart and felt
so warm beneath our barefeet any given July. Nothing seemed to happen,
but everything was going on. Everything was subtle. Every boy and girl
loved to wrestle in the the grass knee-deep churchyard. Every child
loved to dance when the sidewalk was busy. Every boy liked to pinch
girls in the dark corners of the church yard. "Watch me, grandma."
Every person we glimpse through every window of every passing bus is
smiling, laughing, approving.

Streets seemed to spent time with time. It is impossible to describe
the joy I used to take in simply running along the banks of the Black
Creek. A place where my toes baked and caked with dark bowned mud. The
creek was a place where sheepdogs came to quench the thirst and where
the sheperds could be heard sending dozens of calls and whistles that
sent the dogs into a frenzy of counterclockwise and clockwise curves.
The creek served also as the corridor for the northerly wind making my
shirt fly like a wing and forcing my lungs to drink the cold wind. The
wind glides off the surface of the water disarranging thousands of tiny
grains of soil from the mud castle walls, but the rocks and our turf
build dam remained unchanged. How could you know, when you were so
young and impossibly naive and unable to imagine yourself otherwise
that time would teach you that memories can measure the quality of
childhood by the amount of time you made the dust rise like smoke under
your feet, or the countless times Father Glatz said to you "God bless
your soul," or the number of time you smiled in the streets? And when
you are seven years old, smiles you remember seems for ever.

Smiley Aga was a sister I did everything with and told everything to.
Aga laughed at my jokes and I laughed at hers. We whispered words like,
'Santa Maria!' and laughed and laughed and laughed. We cried for the
army of kittens Tato drowned in the Black Creek. I still wonder whether
there is anything deader looking then a drowned kitten. We made crosses
for the bees buried in our garden. As a five year olf I spend countless
hours collecting beetles and other insects from the front of our
garden. We watched the reddest sunsets from Mamka's kitchen table. She
showed me how to ride a bike without training wheels and how to get
noticed by a folklore teacher Marta Chamillova. Aga shared with me
everything except a small vinyl orange purse given to her by auntie
Ota.

In Mamka's absence it was nothing to us to dance on the kitchen table,
or to swing on the door handles. Unlike Aga though, I didn't cry, not
even when the door came off the hinges and Tato's loud voice woke up
all the dead at the cemetery, not even when I got a splinters the size
of a matchstick in Tato's workshop. A workshop that smelled of cedar
shavings and Tato's burst blisters. One of the few things my father
ever read to himself was the Bible and the Old Testament especially was
marked by pussy blister stains of different depth on its pages. I still
don't know if he was more fascinated or terrified by God of the Old
Testament who could strike down thousands of his people if they
disobeyed him! Just like Stalin.

Tato and Mamka secretly enjoyed their evening ritual. "Looks like the
children are now settled for the night,' Tato used to break the
silence. "Suppose we might make some garlic bread and tea?" Mamka
pretended to keep sewing, her eyes rolling over the same stich on her
tablecloth, again and again. Mamka was amused and angered everytime
Tato said used the expression we. Nights stoked with Mamka's strong
rosehip tea and the birth of garlic bread wondering along the bedroom
walls.

For one thing, the only time I ran out of Mamka's kitchen was when she
chopped onions or when she resorted to singing some of the funeral
sounding songs. I loved the smell of garlic. High level of crocodile
tears were mostly shed at night when Tato refused to performs another
magic tricks with cards or read another page of our favourite fairy
tale. When it came to fairy tales, moderation was a key word in Tato's
vocabulary, "All stories in moderation!" "A fairy tale a day keeps the
sleepless night away. Two give you nightmares!"

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of fairy tales in Slovak
culture where "Rozpravky" word comes in handy even in adult
conversations. "Seven times upon a time, when pigs were communists and
before the Russian lost the formular on when to smile, there was a
little boy who lived at the foot of the rainbow in the middle of the
universe, defined by historians as Mittleuropa, at the bottom of
mortuary garden ..."

Slovaks take seriously their rozpravky, fairy tales. Our rozpravky are
not just intended for children. Trading fairy tales for schoners of
beer has been identified by MBA students as the second oldest tradition
in Slavic culture. My parents and older siblings looked forward to
Christmas just as I did. Each season has its particular sensations, the
smells, tastes, sounds - and sights - that help give it a unique
character. Christmas, the favourite season of rozpravky fanciers, has
more than its share of these identifying phenomenon. Just as carp was
part of our Christmas taste buds. So in the eyes of most Slovaks, the
sight most indelibly associated with Christmas was the television
screen filled with Slav rozpravky. Indeed our lunches, suppers and
visits to and from friends and family were carefully arranged to fit
the visual rozpravky. Same films were watched religiously every year,
and all were enjoyed just as much as they were in previous years.
Really real tears came out if I missed on The Song of Viktorka or Proud
Princess or Once Upon a Time there was a King.

Perhaps the most celebrated of all fairy tales became Three Hazelnuts
for Cinderella. A film graced by Karel Gott's (Slavic edition of Tom
Jones) splendid rendition of the unashamedly romantic and
crowd-pleasing title song Where is your nest, o little bird? Artists
understood how to transfer classic rozpravky to silver screen where
personalities jump off the tube without losing any of their magic, and
they treasured this rozpravky tradition even under televised communism
when so many other traditions have been obliterated. They were notable
for their exuberance, wit and escapism. Life without rozpravky was like
summertime without holidays in Pilhov; Holy communion without snowy
bread; Christmas without presents.

When I was seven and Aga twelve, I sensed that somehow the story of
Christmas was no longer a big mystery to Aga. "Where is Aga?"
neighbours asked. The streets ran again with the blood of thousands of
slaughtered carp of our childhood, but Aga no longer wished to play
long, imaginative games in the blood soaked snow or build Saint
Nicholas (Svaty Mikulas). Talk of welcoming Santa Clause were met with
half-hearted attempts at enthusiasm. Aga couldn't hide that doubting
teenager look in her eyes. While Aga was still sledding in a mountain
edition of a rock chair with our neighbours, Ondrej and Ferko Hrebenar,
She simply stopped talking about what she hoped to get from St Nicholas
and Jezisko (Christ, the child).

By December 1967, the year that a new Russian fairy tale by the name
Old Father Frost came on TV screens to us, I too felt somehow reluctant
to broadcast a sighting of the man with the biggest backpack in the
world. Somehow I too began to doubt St Nicholas' test of goodness: Do
you help with carrying water from the pump? Do you eat up all the food
on your plate? Do you go to bed when you're told? Do you make the snow
go yellow in the churchyard? Do you slide down well-salted mountain
roads?

At Christmas time nobody seemed to be surprised to see adults sledding
down the middle of the road. The air just cold enough for you to see
your breath. Fresh breaths of adults and children flying out slammed
doors, diving head first into new snow, red faces, steamy grins, the
same swearing words covered in steam, the same whistles echoing off the
icy white walls. On a bright Sunday you see all of Vrbov from old
grandmothers to children, coasting solemnly down the steep hills roads,
sitting on elevated wooden toilet seats with the smiling expressions on
all their faces. Teenage boys steer with their feet stuck straight out
in front with wiggle different parts of their anatomy in order to stay
on top of the heavy plastic garbage bags.

Snow and Christmas made children of everyone. The people of Vrbov know
it better than most. They know also better than most that new
beginnings were exactly what Christ's birth was all about. Each
Christmas was all about dreams, innocence and hope. Well, our house was
filled with Christmas and New Year resolutions: each year my Tato and
Mamka promised themselves a trip to visit auntie Ota in West Germany.
Still, each year the reality of communism prevailed.

At Christmas, abundance of happiness was allowed. There floated the
sense that Christmas was paradise. Slovaks live and cook by the seasons
and so all of Mamka's dishes used the flavours of winter. Mamka worked
her fingers to the bone skinning the freshly slaughtered carp,
preparing fish soup, buckets of potato salad, a geese or two, and
mainly hundreds of tiny, delicious Christmas cookies so that we would
have something to eat through the holiday period. Fascination with food
and tradition knew no bounds. The food that called forth my most
Proustian raptures were the simple ones: the return of the nut bowl to
its crowning spot on the living room coffee table, Mamka's walnut
cakes, or Gitka's Pavlova, or auntie Anna's caramel pies.

Christmas was Father Glatz dressed in brightly coloured robes swishing
around in front of the golden alter with incense burner swinging
backwards and forwards. All I had to do was breathe and sing a role in
a Christmas Carol. Indeed there was even little homework. For someone
who was perceived in the village as the youngest son of Jozef and Mary,
Christmas was about raiding the fridge and storming into a pantry.
Someone would say, "Don't eat too many sweets or you'll spoil your
appetite." Even I was shocked into recognition of my own amazing
appetite.

Carefree school years with snowmen and sandpit games rolled by as Aga
and I watched the slow rhythm of the happy seasons and the glad world
go by. Tender Sundays were full of joking, teasing, boasting and
bragging. One cousin was going to be a film star, and another a singer.
Even the adults were promising to become travellers and artists. In one
corner of the kitchen stood a barrel of fermenting cabbage. To sit on
top of the round wooden area gave me the most wonderful source
pleasure. Here I passed long winter evenings spying on my aunties and
neighbours, as they sat embroidering by the fire and plugged feathers
from geese, made delicious jams as a row of apples, pears and cherries
roasted and spluttered everywhere around the stove.

At that time, homebaked poppyseed cakes and relative peace existed
around every corner in Vrbov. Routine enveloped us, punctuated by
visits from the ragman and chimney sweepers. Each year we watched the
slope across from our verandah turn golden green, then gradually frosty
white. We were given everything we craved, except a real bicycle.
Unseen, we lived an exciting life and knew nothing about chaos. There
was only one type of chaos that our parents knew and that was the time
between coming home from school to bedtime: a familiar and desirable
type of chaos between 'Please' and 'Mash potatoes.'

Mamka seemed to take time to tell us about the old world as she cooked
gnocchi or preserved plumbs or divided her gladiolus bulbs or tied
bunches of rosemary. Mamka took time to share stories with our
neighbours who told us the latest village news. Vrbov was a village of
actresses. While to lie and to find loopholes in the bible was the
kingdom of men, dreams, adventure and intensity of truth was the land
of queens. In Vrbov you did not need to be a blond or have implants,
but long conversations in German helped, "Ya, Yes, I dreamed about so
and so ... Not a good sign. But a sign. Ya. Ya."

As a little boy, I watched Mamka and her friends closely. The women
were a bit like my dog Zahraj, they liked to circle things and
strangers a few times before they decided if they were going to go in
for a closer look or before they engaged in a conversation with a
stranger. Like Zahraj, they were fascinated by bad behaviour. They
became walking encyclopaedias on this appalling disease. They had keen
intuition, they would know sometimes what would happen minutes, months,
even years beforehand. In our community were herbalists, midwives, and
storytellers with a third eye. Like my grandmother, my Mamka depended
on other women to divine the meaning of dreams, to foresee and prepare
for natural disasters, to spy on her children, to heal illness and
deliver babies, and to perform rites associated with death. These women
were well-informed community organizers who prepared the rituals of the
Catholic church-baptism, communion, confirmation and sometimes helped
the priest to settle family disputes. In our house, we lived in fear of
Mamka's pointed finger, for whatever she said while calling upon Jesus,
St Mary, and St Jozef came to pass in short order.

Once in fluent German even my Mamka's face looked worried. When she ran
out of the sweet Slovak look I knew I was safe to run away and play
with other children. I would return from time to time to pull Mamka's
long skirt. "Mamka, lets go!" I would plead. Under the gently aging
poplars next to the pump my small voice tended to be half unheard as
Mamka would continue to draw water and open her heart to her friends.
Home economics wrapped women's stories round like a shawl: little by
little words became stories about how distant freedom was, how the
bones ached, how quickly the fruit run out, whether there would be one
a week without money worries, and sons who keep telling them it was
time to go home. Women were strong. On daily basos Mamka's fingers
hugged heavy wide baskets and buckets filled with water. Men couldn't
please them. They were too much this or that or not enough of this.
They ate their own husbands. Their eyes would mist over as they looked
at me and recall the magic happy childhood days of their lives. They
dreamed the impossible dreams. For the legacy of women's power was
associated with the "curse of Eve."

My dearest Tato, I was told was a busy man and had an important work to
do. Since I was seven, every minute and every haler (cent) of my Tato's
time and saving was invested in building a two storey house next to our
old house. Tato was hardly ever in the pub. Like with rain, snow and
sun, Tato's opportunities to tell stories at breakfast time was
unevenly distributed. Too often, it was feast and famine.

We knew that it was Mamka's birthday, 14 February, when Tato's glasses
were looking at me from the side of his bed. After breakfast, Tato even
stayed to dry the breakfast dishes at the sink. We knew this was the
time when Tato liked to take part of the day off to turn our Mamka into
his child. He knew Mamka liked her tea weak and toast hot. Sooner
rather than later, Tato would use Mamka's favourite phrase, "The
greatest soccer players in the world would be worn out in a day if he
had to take care of seven children and a dog." Once we came home from
school Tato would tell us for the seventh time how their eyes met at a
Christmas ball. Even though Slovaks do not celebrate Saint Valentine,
this was the day that Tato was drawn to remember various ineffable
stories about different times of their courtship that only his
expressive eyes could capture. I used to put my head on Tatos's wide
shoulder and watch his lips repeat his favourite yarns. The more I
heard those spins the more they seemed to communicate an aura of
timelessness.

I felt a curiosity for everything, almost an addiction, of the kind
that used to get me into trouble. Boys in the village knew that I was
not afraid to take a shortcut through cemetery at midnight. They knew
that it was me who howled and scared people who took the churchyard
shortcuts on All Souls Day. However, I was never alone when we pelted
snow balls at the church windows during a church service. Girls knew
that I swam without underpants on the western side of pond, where the
ghosts of the drowned witches groaned with the creaking willows.