Chapter two

     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.