The Fourth or Fifth Defenestration of Prague, Depending on Who You Believe
by Kathryn A Dettmer
There have been three or four defenestrations in the city of Prague, depending on who you believe, and the people of Prague have been throwing other people out of the window since 1419. The first three were in protest and set off either a religious war or a religious peace. The fourth, if you did not believe the Communist government’s claim of auto defenestration as a method of suicide, and many did not but kept it to themselves for their own safety, was of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the pre-war president. This defenestration happened as the Communists were consolidating power, and it seemed to shut down protest for a long time in its wake.
I only learned about the defenestration of Masaryk after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when we all learned so many things we had never known before. Inspired by some of my friends, who had learned that they were actually Jewish, hidden first under the Nazis and then under the Communists to keep them safe, or that they had uncles and cousins living in Sweden, because the uncle had managed to escape, I decided to ask my own mother some questions about our past. My father had been a doctor at the Army Hospital in Prague, and perhaps I was hoping to learn that he had not cooperated with the Communists because he wanted to, but because he had to. He had died in the spring before the Velvet Revolution, planting potatoes he would not live to see dug up. The problem is that one does not know how a conversation like this will go and I really did not want to upset my mother, who still seemed dazed, like time and history had been accelerated and she just could not get her footing in this new era. I put it off. I waited for my moment.
I came home to spend New Years with her, in our apartment in Prague, to see in the year 1991. We drank champagne and watched fairy tales on television. The next morning, I surprised my mother, who was standing in the window at the end of the kitchen table, holding her cigarette, which was more ash than anything else by now, between her pointer and middle fingers, picking at her lower lip with her thumbnail. She looked pensive and still. This was not her regular attitude of bristling business, developed over years of being a mother and a nurse. The cold air was picking up strands of her faded blond hair done in a style unchanged since the 60s, her pale blue eyes unfocused and far away. I saw the opening that I had been waiting for, “What are you thinking about, Maminko?”
“I thought that after Communism fell and those bastards cleared out, not that I really believed that it was possible after it had gone on so long, but after it fell, that the world would be in technicolor, like in the movies, but look at it,” she gestured out the window with her cigarette, “Still grey. Everything has changed and yet nothing looks different.”
Looking out of the window, I saw what she saw the shabby ice-covered street, snow that was darkening with the pollution in the air after it had been shoveled from the sidewalk, a grey building, identical to the one I grew up in across the street. A tram passed by. It was in need of a good cleaning to remove the soot and salt from its red sides.
I decided to ask her about a mystery from my childhood, from twenty years ago, a funny story, to try to amuse her and shake her gloomy mood. “So, Mami, when Petr was here, he reminded me of a strange thing that happened when we were kids.” Petr was my brother and a bit older than me. He had asked me if I remembered the incident in the same way. My mother turned to ask what I was talking about.
I told her our version of the story, “Maybe I was 8, so Petr was about 10. We had just finished dinner, all of us sitting at the table, and you brought out dessert. Neither Petr nor I could have any. We were on punishment, Petr for his grades, and me probably because I had gotten my socks dirty again, from jumping in a puddle. You announced that it was a special cake, something we had not eaten in a long time, and you had gotten lucky to be able to buy the ingredients at the store. I think maybe it was blueberry. I don’t know.”
My mother interjected here, “It had gooseberries in it.”
I continued, “Then Tati said that he was not going to eat it, that he did not like it and he did not eat it. This happened again the next night. You put the cake on the table, and Petr, who was off punishment, also refused to eat the cake. If his father would not eat it, neither would he. I would have eaten it, but I was still on punishment. You sat at the table and we watched you eat it. Tati asked if there was not any other dessert, and you said no. This would be the only dessert until it was gone. Tati said that if you put the cake on the table the next night, he would throw it out of the window.”
“The next night, the cake appeared after dinner and was set on the table. Tati picked it up, opened the window, and dumped the cake from the plate. I remember us all shocked into laughing, laughing until the doorbell rang. For some reason, we all stopped laughing, maybe because of the way both you and Tati looked horrified.”
“That was fear,” my mother said.
“Tati opened the door and Aunt Nadezda stood on the doorstep. You know, Peter and I , and all of the children really, used to hide from Aunt Nadezda so she could not tell on us, if we were outside playing when we should have been inside doing our homework.”
“Mami, she was covered in cake. There were pieces stuck in her hair and I remember rather than thinking it was funny, I was scared. She was furious and marched into the apartment, announcing that someone had thrown cake on her as she was walking in the building. I remember Tati trying to calm her down and saying that surely whoever threw the cake had not known she was below them, that it had likely been a mistake, that she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the only time I ever remember you and Tati angry with each other.”
“It was not our last fight, just the last one we ever had aloud. Make some tea, put some rum in it and I will tell you the rest of the story.” After we settled down at the table, my mother, blowing the steam off of her cup, began to talk slowly, weighing her words, “First, you need to know that you and Petr were on punishment because we were afraid that your aunt would tell the Party that we were too lax with you. I wanted him to go easier on you, but he was afraid. Your father had gotten Nadezda a job as a cleaner at the hospital, her husband worked as the furnace stoker. Your father thought that it would be good to have some family here in Prague, because we both worked, just in case we needed help with you children. He used his pull at the hospital to arrange for them to live in this building, two floors above us, to bring them from the village to the city where there was more work, a brighter future. He was happy to do this for his big sister who looked out for him when he was a child, telling him tales of the magic of Prague and how one day they would live in the city together. What he did not know, what he did not want to know, was that he was letting a viper into our nest.”
“While your father was in Prague at university, becoming a doctor, joining the army, meeting me, your Aunt Nadezda met that brute, Standa, married him and together they joined the Party. By the time they arrived, in Prague, they resented the lifestyle we had as bourgeois, while their labor, their honest labor, was not rewarded as well. They rose in the ranks of the Party here in Prague, and the more power they had, the more careful we had to be. If you got the socks of your Pioneer uniform dirty by jumping in a puddle, which you should have had the right to do as a child, she said that we were disrespecting the uniform and therefore not respecting the nternational Socialist movement. If your brother’s grades slipped, she said with sarcasm that he would be fine because we could use our pull to still get him into high school, taking the spot from another child from a good family, violating the fairness of the whole socialist system. People thought like this and other people, like us, were afraid of the people who thought like this. By the time that your father threw the cake out the window, neither your aunt nor your uncle still worked at the hospital, they had become functionaries of the Party and they ruled this apartment block with fists of iron, reporting people who lacked loyalty to the Party or respect for our Soviet brothers. In fact, Nadezda had good reason to believe that someone would target her for reporting them, even if it was just with a cake.”
“When you father threw the cake out of the window, it was out of frustration with me and with her, with the situation we found ourselves in. If he had known his sister was under the window, he would have been too afraid to do what he did, but he lost his head, did not think and he just threw it. At first, we all laughed, I think from surprise. Throwing the cake out of the window broke the tension that had been there for days, and it felt good, until your aunt rang the doorbell. We shushed you before your father answered the door, but you were used to that, no sense in letting people know we were happy, in case they got suspicious. She blew into the apartment, still covered in cake, screaming that it was a plot against her and see how people resisted the Party, that someone in the building did this to show their disdain for Socialism. Nadezda scared you so much that you started to cry. Petr’s eyes were like saucers. When she saw your expressions, she read them as fear for her, not of her, and then she told you not to worry, that she would catch who did this and have them sent to the coal mines, that the doctors and nurses in this building thought they were better than she was, too good for the Party, but the Party would show them.”
“We lived in fear for months after the official investigation was launched, but Nadezda told them it could not be us, we were loyal to her and by extension to the Party. People in the building looked at us differently. Some of them were forced to leave their jobs, having confessed, when questioned, to other things entirely. When the authorities spoke to your father, he told them that he could not imagine who could have wasted a perfectly good cake like that, with gooseberries, the kind of cake that reminds one of the village where one grew up, his favorite kind of cake. They nodded their heads and agreed, and eventually it died down when your aunt and uncle moved to a better apartment,” and then her story was finished, her eyes shining, but her tears not falling.
I said, “But I still do not understand why Tati threw the cake out of the window. Why did he do something so dangerous.”
“Oh, that is an easy question to answer. Your father hated gooseberries. When he was a little boy, after the war when there was not much food to be had, he went to gather them one morning, and gorged himself, putting more in his stomach than in the bucket. For two days, he was sick as a dog. His older sister continued to make him eat them, and when we started going out, he told me that when he was successful he would never eat them again. I was angry about the punishment of my children because of his sister and so I made him a gooseberry cake, knowing he would refuse to eat it,” and at this she smiled a little sadly.
“Mami, Petr and I would have been more careful when we were children, if we had known that we were putting you in danger,” I whispered.
She sighed, and began clearing away the tea things, “You children were not who put us in danger. It was the adults around you. Your aunt and uncle are gone now, and your father, he too is gone now. It is over.”
This was the first and last time my mother ever spoke to me about this incident, or anything else that was not in the present or occasionally the future. I do not think that she was the only one who chose not to speak about the past. Those days were dark and their stories were likely full of small everyday defenestrations that no one will remember as time goes on. At least there are the historic ones to remind people and I for one, will always believe that Masaryk was heped out of his high narrow bathroom window, by the people around him.
#
more of the 2025 !Short Story Contest!
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ bonafides
by 
by
Our sphere