Raising Trump Read online

  Babi organized her life around mine. She would get up every morning at dawn to wake me, give me breakfast, help me with my homework, and braid my hair, all before I went to school. Mom’s “free” hours were spent working as a phone operator at the shoe factory, shopping, cleaning, repairing, and cooking. I have no idea how hard her life would have been if she’d had more children. She picked me up at three p.m. from school and took me to afternoon sports practice before heading home to cook dinner and help me with more homework before bedtime. I was in bed at seven p.m. every night. At that hour, the same folk song came on the radio, and that was my signal to drop whatever I was doing and go to sleep.

  Every summer, I would go to my maternal grandparents’ farm/vineyard in the region of Czechoslovakia called Moravia. My mother would put me on a train in the city and I had to change trains midway by myself. Mind you, I was only six years old. My grandmother Anna would pick me up on the other side. Life in the country was much easier than in Zlín. For one thing, the police weren’t watching our every move, and I didn’t have to get up at dawn for school or sports practice. I could play with the chickens, goats, ducks, and dogs. I remember stomping Riesling grapes to make wine. People would visit the farm to sample the wine with slices of homemade bread and bacon, and maybe buy a barrel to take home. My grandparents Anna and Vaslav took me to the summer celebrations, where twelve beautiful girls and twelve handsome boys dressed in traditional costumes and danced, and everyone baked kolacky, a pastry with cottage cheese in the middle and nuts or fruit on top.

  I ate so well in the summers. All the food came from the farm itself. We had tomatoes, string beans, peaches, cucumbers, carrots, and lettuce. My grandmother fed the ducks corn to make their livers big. We grilled the livers and ate the duck fat on homemade bread with salt. Delicious. They raised pigs, too, and once a year, they were slaughtered and put on the spit platform by the cellar staircase to be turned into blood sausages and white sausages. Every part of the pig, snout to tail, was used. I was playing in the cellar one day when suddenly the whole pig platform collapsed. A two-hundred-pound dead animal blocked the exit, and I was stuck down there all day. I didn’t mind. I had a great time eating the stores of bacon and taking bites out of the butter and bread we kept down there. When they found me, the block of butter had my tooth marks in it.

  When summer ended, I returned to the city to get back to work. I had two jobs: school and sports. As a student, my grades were monitored closely because we weren’t party members. If I didn’t get perfect scores, I would have been kicked out and put to work in a factory. I was also an athlete from age six on, training and competing in swimming and skiing. My father pushed me into sports to make me stronger and to give me a way up and, possibly, out. In communist Czechoslovakia, there were only two ways you could excel and lift your family to a higher status. One way was playing sports and winning competitions. The other way was to be a gifted musician or ballerina. If you were good, you would be sent to other countries to compete or perform. If you were very good and won races or wowed audiences, you could earn special privileges for your family at home.

  Party members, as always, had advantages in those areas, too. They got better coaches and teachers than I did. My father knew that I would be competing against well-prepared athletes, and he made me work that much harder to win. One of my earliest memories was when Dedo, a competitive swimmer himself, took me to a lake near our house, put my arms around his neck, loaded me onto his back, and started swimming. I was around four. The water was freezing—I hated cold water and still do—but I enjoyed riding on Dedo’s back as he cut through the water to the middle of the lake. He loosened my arms from around his neck and dove down, emerging a few feet away from me, leaving me to tread water on my own.

  He said, “Now swim back to shore.”

  I knew what he was up to. He’d tried to make me swim before. I said, “No!” I was a stubborn kid and he wasn’t going to make me do anything I didn’t want to.

  “I’ll give you a hundred korunas,” the equivalent of five dollars.

  This was new. I thought about it and said, “Okay, you’ve got a deal.”

  Swimming wasn’t as horrible as I thought, and I started competing. Whenever I won, Dedo gave me an orange (in due time, our tropical fruit was imported from communist Cuba, and thus a special treat). He had to get me a lot of oranges, because I won often. When I was five, my father took me skiing for the first time, and I fell instantly in love. I started competing, and won my first race at age six. I won so often, the government took notice and watched me even more closely.

  For the next five years, I was swimming or skiing whenever I wasn’t in school or sleeping. I’d get up, eat, do my homework, go to the pool, swim for hours, go to school, go home, do more homework, eat dinner, and pass out by seven p.m. Every weekend, I hit the slopes and skied all day. Sports took over my mother’s life, too. She had to get me to all my practices and competitions. You could compare it to an American suburban soccer mom, but Babi didn’t have help at home, or reliable access to a car or money for gas, or a big-box supermarket to shop in, or frozen food, or modern appliances. She was tough as nails and never complained about her hardships once.

  We lived by this hectic schedule for my entire childhood. Hard training in two sports was just what I did. I didn’t question it. But when I turned thirteen, my coaches raised an issue with my father about my sports future. The goal for every athlete was to make the Olympic team. My father thought I had a shot in both sports, but the coaches said that swimming developed the upper body, and skiing was all about the legs. Bottom line: I couldn’t do both. I had to choose one or the other. My parents left the decision up to me.

  That weekend, we were going to our family’s chalet in the mountains. “Our family’s chalet” sounds more impressive than it was. It was a tiny A-frame house, and to get there you had to take a bus and then walk two miles through heavy powdered snow up the mountain. You’d walk up and ski down, no rope tow or chairlift. We went with friends and neighbors. A few men walked up first to make a trail, kids in the middle and women in the back. Everyone carried up food for the weekend in backpacks. One time, Babi brought a jar of raspberry jam to leave in the chalet, but I wanted it all for myself and snuck it back to the city in my backpack. When my father took my pack off the top of the bus, he accidentally dropped it. The hidden jar broke and covered everything with jam. He was so mad, he chased me for a mile home from the bus stop.

  We were planning to go to the chalet the weekend after my father had that talk with my coaches about having to make the choice between swimming and skiing. Before we left, Dad said, “Ivana, if you want to keep swimming, stay in the city with your grandparents and go to the pool. If you want to ski, show up at the mountain tomorrow.”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. I showed up at the mountain.

  Swimming wasn’t for me. It was just too boring to be underwater, surrounded by four walls. I preferred the danger of racing down an icy slope at eighty miles an hour on a pair of sticks. On the swim team, I’d go pool to pool. But on the ski team, I’d go mountain to mountain, to Italy and Austria, Switzerland and France. I’d meet Westerners and see the wonders on the other side.

  I became a member of the national juniors ski team and gave the sport even more of my time and energy. As a result, my grades suffered. Bad grades put me at serious risk of being kicked out of school. So that summer, instead of going to the farm, my father put me on the assembly line at the Bata shoe factory to show me what life would be like without an education. I didn’t know about Louboutins; all I knew was Bata. These were not exciting shoes, okay? The idea of working on the line making ugly and boring shoes for the rest of my life was terrifying. I begged my father to let me quit, but he made me stay until I learned my lesson. I told myself, “Over my dead body will I ever do this again.” When I returned to school that fall, you better believe I got straight As.

  My parents worked hard for me, and I worked jus
t as hard for all of us. Being less than the best was simply not an option, because, in a very real way, one mistake could doom your life. We couldn’t be sure who to trust outside the family. It was all too common for neighbors, teachers, and coaches to report people to the police for saying or doing the wrong thing. My childhood was defined by discipline, determination, and loyalty. I didn’t know any other way to survive.

  -2-

  HOT PANTS, LIPSTICK, AND TANKS

  When I was fourteen, the Czech juniors team went to ski camp on the Italian Matterhorn at the end of summer to start practice. It was not the Western experience I hoped for. I could have been anywhere in the world, as I saw nothing but the dorms, the trails, and the cafeteria. Every move we made was watched by the communist coaches and trainers. The skiers weren’t allowed to leave their rooms without a police escort. We woke up at dawn to go straight to the mountain to train for three hours. My events were slalom (skiing between tightly arranged poles), giant slalom (skiing between more spread-out poles), and, my specialty, downhill (skiing as fast as possible straight down the mountain). I’d race through the course, take the lift back to the top, and do it again, over and over. When the sun was high and the snow got heavy, we would go to the bottom of the mountain for sprints and weight training with the coaches. After lunch, we were back on the mountain, racing until the sun went down and the slopes turned to sheer ice that would crunch and crack under your skis.

  My life was ski, ski, eat, run, train, ski, eat, sleep. I was a prisoner of the system and felt rightly trapped in it, but at least I was alive and free in the exhilaration, speed, and danger while racing. I pushed myself hard to be fast and win. If I didn’t, I might have been kicked off the team. If you added even a few seconds to your time, you might lose your spot. If you had a serious fall and broke a bone, you were gone. Good-bye to travel, good-bye to special privileges for your family, hello to the assembly line for life.

  The team went to Vienna, Austria, which was only two hours from my hometown, but it might as well have been a different planet. At a market, I saw a strawberry in February for the first time. I couldn’t believe my eyes. People could have fresh fruit in winter? This was available to everyone? The entire market amazed me. Fruits and vegetables of every kind and color, things I’d never seen before, butchers with dozens of cuts of meat in cases, and people from all walks of life just going into the shop, buying whatever they wanted, and taking it home in a brown wax-paper bundle.

  I was in awe of all the beautiful things in Vienna: the stylish clothes on the women walking down the street; stores selling books, furniture, art, musical instruments, hats, beautiful shoes (no Bata there), candy, chocolate, pretzels, beer—so much beer; and restaurants full of happy, laughing people holding menus with endless options. I walked around the city with my jaw perpetually open. The variety astonished me. I’d had no idea that such abundance existed. For me, luxury was salt. Veal once a month was extravagant. But here, there were cakes and champagne, enormous shiny cars and fur coats. This was the better life on the other side. On that day I swore that I’d live it.

  When I was seventeen, I moved to Prague to study at Charles University, the oldest university in central Europe, founded in 1348 (three hundred years before Harvard). If not for my grades and skiing, I never would have been permitted to go there to study German and English, languages that would help lay the world at my feet. I was a few hours from home, but I felt safe in the city on my own.

  At that time, Czechoslovakia was starting to wake up from a long Soviet winter in what became known as the Prague Spring. A political reformer named Alexander Dubček was elected as first secretary of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, and he cut back on restrictions in the arts and media, public speech, and travel. As a result, our capital was booming with new culture and ideas, challenging the oppression of the past two decades. Cafés and dance halls opened. People were reading illicit materials and writing their own. New music filtered into our world, and I was right in the middle of the cultural revolution.

  I was still closely watched, of course. As well as being on the university ski team, I started modeling and acting. I was getting to be a little famous at school—but the government had ways of making sure you knew who was really in control. Every time I came back from a sporting event in the West, I had to report to the police station for a two-hour “interview” (really, an interrogation) by the communists. I’d sit down on a metal chair in a room with white walls, and two men would ask me the same questions each time: “What did people wear?” “What did they eat?” “What did they say?”

  I’d let them pick my brain and answered the questions, keeping my replies factual and short, and my true feelings under lock and key. If I acted too excited about seeing a strawberry in winter in Vienna, they might worry about a defection and not let me travel again. Pretending to be nonchalant was good training for dealing with the media later on in my life, but it also conditioned me to block and hide my emotions. To this day, it’s very hard for me to let any vulnerability show.

  After an hour of questioning, they’d let me go. “Okay, Ivana. See you next month,” they’d say, and I’d slowly walk out of there. I wanted to run.

  Over time, I got to know the interviewers pretty well because I was traveling so much for skiing and came to see them less as enemies and more as regular people just doing their jobs. I started to bring them back presents from my travels—chewing gum, cigarettes, lipsticks, and panty hose for their girlfriends—and my interviews got a lot shorter. My father’s trick of offering me the equivalent of five dollars to swim to shore paid off for me in that white room. A little bribery worked wonders.

  Sex was forbidden for skiers. If the coaches found out that you were doing it, you were kicked off. Same thing with alcohol. One beer was enough to warrant permanent ejection. At the time, I had a boyfriend named George and we kept our romance a secret, but not our friendship. We trained together, running up and down steps in town and through the woods for a rendezvous. I had some money for the first time in my life, thanks to our Austrian sponsors, Fischer and Atomic Skis. I bought a navy Fiat 500, and George got a BMW. We had to maintain our grades at school, but we were given a special exam schedule. I was on the mountains from August to April, so I took all my exams in May, June, and July. I would cram a year’s worth of information into my head in a week, ace the test, and then forget it all the next day. At school, we had a special dining room and were given tickets daily for lunches and dinners, but because I was away so much and had so many extra tickets, I would invite all my friends—artists, musicians, and architects, the devils of Prague—to the dining room so they could eat veal, chicken, and fresh veggies that they normally couldn’t get.

  Athletes were treated like national heroes and were given a lot of leeway. As long as I was on the ski team, I could park my Fiat anywhere in town. Once, I parked too close to the tram tracks, and a bunch of men got off the tram, lifted up the car, and moved it one meter to the left. There was a tunnel by my school that, if I went through it, would get me from my house to the school’s front door in five minutes. But the tunnel was closed going in that direction, so you had to go around, adding twenty minutes to the trip. I would wait until a tram came by and then drive alongside it in the illegal direction. The police on the other side couldn’t see me. I did this for years before a cop finally pulled me over.

  I played the little country girl in my hot pants and leather boots (fashion choices that were possible thanks to Dubček’s reforms) and started to cry. I said, “Officer! I’m lost!”

  He said, “You’ve been doing it for years, and now you’re going to pay!”

  So much for my act.

  He gave me a ticket, and kept giving them to me whenever he caught me. The next time I went to the police station for my post-travel interview, I handed over a carton of cigarettes and panty hose, and a big stack of parking and traffic tickets. I said, “I was so busy skiing and doing my homework, I forgot to pay these.” T
he fines could amount to the equivalent of a hundred dollars.

  The head cop would put my gifts in his desk drawer and say, “Okay, Ivana. You still have to pay your fines. Give me two hundred korunas,” or about ten bucks.

  I was a good student and decided to continue on with school to get my master’s in physical education. I stayed on the ski team as well. In 1968, the Prague Spring rolled into summer. I was supposed to go to Cervinia for ski camp soon, but I hated to leave my friends in the city when we were having so much fun. But the Russians didn’t like the Czech people to think and learn, or to forget who was in charge. In August, five thousand Soviet tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square, the cultural and historical heart of Prague. Two hundred thousand Soviet and other Warsaw Pact countries’ soldiers invaded the city, intent on reasserting control, crushing the new sense of freedom, and ousting Dubček. At Radio Prague, the workers refused to let the communists take over the station, and twenty people were executed on the spot. Government leaders who resisted were rounded up and sent to Moscow—to be tortured and killed, no doubt. Over one hundred protesters, students similar to me and my friends, were murdered where they stood on the street. It was one of the biggest foreign invasions since World War II.

  Prague was mayhem, a living nightmare. I saw the tanks arrive and ran to hide in the university dorms. The next day, when the team took a train to Italy, I was on it. We stayed in Cervinia for two weeks and managed to get our hands on newspapers to learn what was happening in Prague. It scared the daylights out of me. I thought long and hard about defecting to Italy then and there, but that would mean I’d never see my family again, and that they’d be in trouble with the government, especially now. I couldn’t be responsible for their suffering, so I returned to Prague and was heartbroken by the change. The cafés and clubs were closed. The music had stopped. People were afraid to be out in public. No wonder: the streets were crawling with hard-line communist police and soldiers.