Fly, Honeybee, Fly: A Memoir

By Eva Robberts-Vankova

Eva’s childhood seemed to be a paradise. Her father, a powerful communist, introduced her to a life of the privileged. Eva attended private school, skated with international hockey stars, and dined with the Swedish king. But as Eva grew up in Stockholm surrounded with love, care, and warmth, she had no idea her paradise would eventually collapse like a house of cards in the wind.

In a fascinating retelling of her life story, Eva Robberts-Vankova reveals how she found herself imprisoned between people she did not know or understand as her once loving father turned into a total stranger. While attempting to find her place in a world deprived of freedom, a confused and desperate Eva finally realized there was no place for her. It was time to go. As she reveals how her journey led her to love and a new chapter in America, Eva provides inspiration to others that with a little determination and a lot of hope, it is possible to overcome obstacles, create positive change, and ultimately find forgiveness and happiness.

Fly, Honeybee, Fly shares the coming-of-age true story of a girl living in Czechoslovakia as her world collapses, forcing her to find her place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532062841

Eva Robberts-Vankova

Eva Robberts-Vankova graduated from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She currently lives in Tomball, Texas, with her husband and two dogs.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 Eva Robberts-Vankova.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6285-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6284-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018914628

iUniverse rev. date: 02/06/2019

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Part 1 What My Parents Told Me

The Poem

The Vase

Ilona

Part 2 What Life Gave Me

Ingo

How I Met the Real Santa Claus

The King

Fly, Honeybee, Fly!

Red Tanks

My First Kiss

The Crash

Swedish Paradise

The Feet

Long Live the Republic

Hide and Seek the Bottle

Fiftieth Birthday

Part 3 What I Made of My Life

My First Love

My Long Journey

The Other World

The Visit

Crime and Punishment

The Return

The Deleted Chapter

What Is Essential

Part 4 How I Learned the Purpose of Life

Prologue

The Piano

After the Competition

The Cup

After the Victory

The Black Noses

Alpha, Beta, and Omega

Our Life with Ivy and Amigo Today

Part 5 How I Understood the Infinity of Life

Goodbye

Fly, Honeybee, Fly II

The Faith

The Dream

In loving memory of my mom and dad

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my daughter, Juhanna, for the long hours she spent reading my manuscript and giving me constructive feedback; my son, Adam, for beautiful illustrations for my book and book cover; and my husband, Juhan, for his never-ending encouragements and love. And to the wonderful iUniverse team, please know that this book wouldn’t have become a reality without your help.

36276.png

PART 1

WHAT MY PARENTS TOLD ME

36207.jpg

The Poem

When I was three years old, my father taught me a poem. I recited it in front of one hundred people at a Mother’s Day celebration. I had to stand on a chair because the microphone was too high for me. I don’t remember being scared or nervous; I was just excited to surprise my mother. She had no idea what Dad and I had secretly been up to.

I curtsied and started:

My Mama

When I woke up in the morning,

I saw the sun; how it was smiling.

But even if it smiled one hundred times at my pajamas,

It could never smile as bright as my mama.

People applauded. Somebody helped me off the chair, and I ran to my parents. My father gave me a hug. You were perfect, he said. His eyes were shining like two diamonds, and his whole face was smiling. By now, I know that this is how dads look when they are very proud of their daughters.

I think it was a little too much attention for my uncertain mother. She did not tell me I looked beautiful or that I had made her very happy. Instead, she turned to my father and said, Slavek, you must be crazy. I was disappointed.

When I grew older, it became a popular story to tell, and my parents used to laugh about it. I could not understand that, because to me it was not funny at all. It was sad.

It took me a long time to understand that telling the story over and over again was my mother’s way of apologizing for not complimenting me for learning and reciting the poem. It was even much later when I understood why Dad was laughing too. He knew that my mother loved the poem and that I had made her very happy. She just could not find the right words to tell me so.

He laughed to support my mother despite the fact that somewhere deep in his heart he must have been hurting as much as I was—and maybe even more. He’d taught me the poem to surprise my mother, and he’d also written it for her.

The Vase

Adventures of any type never appealed to me. I find it difficult to imagine why somebody would want to climb Kilimanjaro (or any other mountain, for that matter), risking his or her own life and the lives of others, dive in the Black Sea to see that there is nothing to see, or jump with a parachute out of a plane—even with an instructor.

Taking off on a plane or experiencing turbulence is more than enough adventure for me. The flight attendant’s announcement Welcome to [whatever country in the world], the local time is [so-and-so], and thank you for flying [whatever airline in the world] makes me feel like the winner of a beauty contest.

I have always been like this, seemingly even before I was born, which is probably why I decided to leave my mom’s belly with my legs first rather than with my head first, despite numerous attempts of the doctor to turn me around and the dismay of my mother. I still cannot understand why I was supposed to jump headfirst into the unknown and waterless world; feetfirst was much safer.

The delivery took twenty-six and a half hours (my mother remembers that exactly). She suffered through it without an epidural or any other drugs to soften the pain. Once I was safely born, she decided that it would be the first and last time she would give birth. Unlike most other women, she never changed her mind.

The first person to see me was my dad. Husbands, or anybody else, were not allowed to be present for the delivery (and in the case of my parents, it probably was not such a bad idea).

My mother put me into my father’s arms and said, Here she is, your daughter. Do not ever ask me to go through this again.

I don’t know whether my father said anything back.

The second person to see me was my maternal grandmother. I was born in May; when spring arrives in Prague, the trees blossom, and tulips, narcissus, and other flowers color the streets of the city. My grandma brought my mom a bouquet of little white lilies.

For you and the little one, she said. She did not kiss or hug my mom and did not tell her how proud and happy she felt. My grandmother was a woman of little emotion and few words. Sometimes my mother was the same. Of course she loved the flowers and the scent of spring they brought into her hospital room, but instead of saying so, she only said, I do not have a vase here.

I will ask Slava to bring one, my grandma answered.

So it happened that my father was tasked with finding a vase for the lilies. He always argued that his task was to buy a vase and not a vase for lilies. This might not seem to be an important fact, but it is—because he arrived in the hospital with a very heavy forty-inch-tall vase made of brownish Czech lead glass that would easily fit a whole tree. My mother got really angry when she saw it. Since they were in a hospital room, she could not scream at him. Instead, she started to cry.

Today the vase is standing on my huge antique desk in the study, and it is beautiful. Every Friday, I buy fresh flowers, arrange them in the vase, and look at them for a little while and smile. I wish that my mom and dad knew that the vase finally found its place.

Ilona

While my mother always used to tell the vase story, the Ilona story was my father’s.

After two miscarriages and years of treatments, my mother was finally pregnant. It was time to find the right name for the baby.

Thanks to the name law, my parents had exactly 366 names to choose from. The name law was one of many completely pointless communistic inventions. Unlike many others, this one was relatively harmless. It stated that parents were allowed to give their children only the names from the official Czechoslovak calendar. There was one name for every day, with the exception of December 24, which had two names: Adam and Eva. To avoid any confusion, February 29 was a nameless day.

This law prevented the parents from giving their children inappropriate capitalistic names like Elvis or Marilyn. (By the way, the name Adolf was in the calendar.)

Following Czech tradition, if my parents had a boy, they would name him after his father. That seems quite straightforward, but it was not.

My father was born long before the communists implemented the name law. Unfortunately, his name, Slava (fame), was not in the official Czechoslovak calendar.

The closest name to Slava approved by the communists was Slavek, and people usually called him Slavek anyway because who calls a man fame? They agreed on that one. For my mom, it was not an issue at all because she was sure she was carrying a girl despite the fact that there were no ultrasounds in those days.

My father often mentioned that my mother made a big point of the fact that she was carrying the baby, that she went through hell of pain to get pregnant, and that she considered his involvement in the process completely negligible. Consequently, she also believed that she was entitled to choose the name for a girl.

My parents excluded some names immediately: Maria, the name of the wife of my mother’s brother; Jana, the name of the daughter of her brother; and Bozena, the name of the mother of my father. Dana also got excluded because it rhymes with Jana.

Since they both wanted a name that was easy to pronounce, all names starting with R, like Rericha, were eliminated as well.

My dad wanted an international name and suggested Eva. My mother did not like it because Eva sounds like Ema, and Ema was the little smiling girl in the Czechoslovak first-grade reading books. She had blonde hair, a pink dress, blue socks, and white shoes. The first letters Czech children learn in school are E, A, and M, which together make Ema. Funnily enough, I do not like the name either, despite its popularity these days.

The name they finally selected for a girl was not the result of an agreement between my parents. It was my mother’s choice, and my father did not protest. It was Ilona.

I finally arrived after twenty-six and half hours of labor. My legs came out first, and my mother was closer to death than to life. She certainly did not care about all the papers that had to be filled out to register her baby as a new citizen of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. (I still wonder if the fresh parents had to fill out whether their baby was a communist, would consider being a communist, or would never want to be a communist. I guess they did not choose the third option because that would make the future of their baby very uncertain.)

My dad took care of everything so that my mother could rest and recover. When she felt better and I was properly washed and dressed, the nurse brought me to the room.

Here we are. This is your beautiful daughter, Eva. Congratulations, proud parents! she said in a high voice, all smiles. Lovely name, she added and rushed out of the room, probably to congratulate other proud parents.

My mother gave my father a look and asked in a cold voice, Eva?

Sorry. I forgot the other name, he said with a smile and a shrug of his shoulders. To his big surprise (as he always admitted), my mother did not get angry or cry. She was holding a healthy, beautiful baby girl, and that was all that mattered.

Many years later, in my first book, I called the heroine Ilona. My mother had the book on her night table for as long as I can remember, but she never read it. Her English was not good enough to read a book. I will always wonder if she ever noticed the name, right there on the first page: Ilona.

36276.png

PART 2

WHAT LIFE GAVE ME

Picture%202.jpg

Ingo

I wrote a story about Ingo in fourth or fifth grade, and it started like this: He was everything I dreamed about, everything I ever wanted. He made me the luckiest girl in the world.

It was a little too dramatic, but I needed a dramatic opening to get the attention of my teacher and hopefully an A+.

This time, I will start the story a little differently.

He made us laugh (when he sneaked into the stall of the goats and slept with them). He taught us how to enjoy every minute of life (because it is so much fun to run after a stick and bring it back again!). He showed us how to cherish the small things (when he took a nap in front of the TV and completely ignored Grandma saying, This dog is so stupid. How can he sleep when the film is so thrilling?). He made me understand that discipline (never take your boss’s place on the sofa) is a good thing—and respecting others (don’t bark at strangers on the street) too. He taught me that I would always be responsible for the things I do and that if I messed up I would pay for it (like he did when he ate Grandma’s Christmas cookies).

Before Ingo joined us, our family consisted of my mother, my father, and me. We lived in Zizkov, one of the darkest and poorest parts of Prague, in a small apartment with a tiny kitchen and one room that served as the dining room, family room, and bedroom.

Near the apartment was a little park where I went with my mother almost every day. We liked to build sandcastles and bake sand cookies and then pretend that we really ate them.

Every now and then, a merry-go-round was set up in the park with free rides. I preferred riding on the white horse, and my mom liked the golden royal carriage.

Around this time, I also got my first big doll. She had shiny blonde hair and blue eyes that closed when she slept. She could cry, but she never did because I took such good care of her.

Every evening, we cooked dinner for Dad and then waited for him to come home. Sometimes he was very late, but my mother never complained.

Your daddy is very busy, she would tell me with a smile. It was only when I grew up that I understood how lonely and sad she was during these years.

My mother was born and raised in a small town about forty miles from Prague. After I was born, she, Dad, and I moved to Prague. It does not seem that far away, but in those days, it was like the distance between New York and Alaska. There was no phone or email or Skype. She did not know anybody in Prague and missed her mother, her friends, and her family. And yet she surrounded me with love, care, and warmth. I never, even for a second, felt her sadness.

Everything changed with the arrival of Ingo. He is the only reason I have ever found to be thankful to the communists. Without their dumb rules, we would have never gotten him.

He was supposed to be employed by the Czechoslovak Secret Police. According to the communist rule, only the first three dogs in the litter could be trained for such an important job. Ingo was the fourth, which, according to this rule, made him neither smart nor strong enough to protect the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic.

His future was to be euthanized. My father heard of the little puppy’s destiny, and it broke his heart. He took him home. (As a teenager and young adult, I often doubted whether my dad had a heart at all, and I used this story to convince myself that he did. Today, I am certain he did.)

Ingo arrived in a shopping bag. He had big brown scared eyes, a black nose, and teeth as sharp as needles. He was a German shepherd, eight weeks old. I remember holding him in my arms to never let him go. It was love at first sight. He peed on me, and then he peed on the only carpet we had in our apartment, and then he started crying. He missed his mom and siblings.

Can I keep him? I asked.

My dad nodded.

I gave him a hug and a big kiss, and then I started dancing around the apartment. Thank you. Thank you, I shouted.

My mother did not share my enthusiasm. Slava, a shepherd in this apartment? she argued carefully.

I will train him, he answered without any hesitation in his voice, and he kept his promise. At the age of three months, the German shepherd was walking through the streets of Prague without a lead. He came, sat, and stayed when he was asked. The number of items he destroyed was very limited. He did eat one of my teddy bears, but I graciously forgave him.

Ingo was more of a boy’s name than a dog’s name, but I insisted on it because it was the name of my neighbor who I was secretly in love with.

Every weekend, we went to my mother’s village. Ingo and I sat in the back of the car and enjoyed the ride. I loved to tell him stories about everything my imagination produced.

One day, my cousin, who was three years older, said, He does not understand what you are saying.

I started crying