Chapter
1
It was
going to be a long night at U Fleku…
I had
parked myself at the end of a long wooden table, lights reflected on its
well-tanned surface like a crooked selection of smiles. It was a mighty,
majestic table and as well as bearing witness to the buff brush of thousands of
elbows it was pock-marked with all the warts and wattles of age, as were its
fellow travelers in the room. For a brief Lord of the Rings
moment I thought it carved out of a single tree — but an inner voice whispered
(with the treacherous hiss of a latter day Gollum perhaps) that its real maternal home might actually be a
warehouse (and associated website) whose owner had made their name in supplying
Czech pubs such as U Fleku with suitably Gothic adornments. Meanwhile the bench
that the table held dominion over seemed pulled straight from the
suffer-the-little-children school of canes, cold baths and compulsory Latin.
And yet in spite of the forbidding and elemental appearance of sternness, the
furniture was surprisingly comfortable in the chiseled, gravel-voiced,
Valhalla-lite ambience of this central European beer-hall.
The table
belonged to a family of eight that I counted laid out barrack-square tidy
against the wooden panels that reached halfway up the wall on both sides of the
room; the pub had eight similarly furnished rooms into which tourists were
funneled as soon as they crossed the threshold from the street outside. If
you’ve never been to Prague and know nothing about the city, or if you have but
shown no interest in its beery heritage, then imagine a place like U Fleku as a
beery totem pole standing at the centre of the city’s tourist industry, a
station of the cross at which disciples pause and pray, or maybe a place from
where the call from the muezzin conjoins the faithful to the evening’s
reflection. It is on the map, part of the plan for a Prague stroll, a go-to
place and in the top 20 hits that revolve around Prague. I think you might get
the idea.
My visit to
U Fleku had not been planned when I emerged from the smooth confines of the
metro, wary and weary, but eager to catch a wave on the swell of people
tramping through the late afternoon September sunshine. I walked amongst them,
but not of them, through the canyon-tall streets, gazing upwards at Prague’s
fabulous architectural pick and mix of baroque, art nouveau, Renaissance,
Gothic and French Imperial styles. A quicksilver decision, a look at a map;
there was time enough to take myself off to U Fleku, before an appointment with
a brewer at another brewpub (U Medviku if you must know). Carrying on, I had
stopped again and looked at my map. A man in a bobble hat, thick coat
incongruous in the sunshine, a face like a scrawl on a wall, asked me if he
could help. I replied that I was ok, a bit sharply perhaps, suspicious,
perhaps, as is my way (years ago I learnt while travelling to reply to anyone I
felt might be undesirable in Welsh — that soon had me left alone). No offence taken it seemed, he then asked,
‘do you want to buy some Krona?’ I smiled, said no thanks, flapping my hand in
front of me, and carried on, puzzled by the sort of exchange I thought had gone
out of fashion when the Cold War had toppled off the catwalk of history
accompanied by the mood music of a disjointed model’s fall.
I thought
briefly of him as I took my table and wondered what his life was like. A rapid
flurry of images of decline fed some inner conveyor belt before I returned to
the now and nodded to the couple on the adjoining table, against which I had
squeezed, rucksack clamped to my torso with the familiarity of a firm
handshake, aware of the ripples of sweat rolling down my back. They were
holding hands across the salt and pepper and for a brief moment I thought they
looked aggrieved to have a neighbour. I was sweaty, unshaven and wearing worn
(but comfortable) climbing boots, dark blue cargo trousers and a combat jacket
out of whose numerous pockets poked a variety of pens, notebooks and maps.
Settled in
my chair, table flat in front of me like the Hungarian plains across which the
invaders of Europe progressed century after century, I opened my notepad and
started to write, to record my thoughts on what I saw and felt.
‘Are you a
writer,’ asked the man on the next table, ignoring his companion who looked at
me with a certain sense of irritation. He spoke uncertain English with a brisk
German inflection. He’d probably
noted the tiny Union Jack stitched onto the arm of my jacket, a heraldic
reminder of its secondhand surplus nature.
‘Journalist,’
I corrected him kindly, ‘yes, also a writer, I’ve wanted to visit this place
for a long time, taste the beer, it’s good, I’m told, I write about beer.’
‘The beer,’
he said, ‘is not bad for Czech beer but we have good beer in Germany. Perhaps
better.’ He paused. ‘Write about
beer? You must have the best job in the world.’
I nodded
and smiled, but really wanted to tell him to see my tax returns. Writing about
beer isn’t the most lucrative career in the world, but on the other hand… He
lifted his glass of beer to me in salute and returned to his companion who gave
me a brief tight smile of cold politeness.
The room in
which I sat, within the company of a smattering of drinkers, no doubt tourists
like myself and my neighbours, unveiled itself to me as a Teutonic-like shrine
to dark wood though September’s late afternoon sunlight softened the hardness
as it reached in and stroked the stained glass windows. I noted the large metal
chandeliers that swooped down from the ceiling, cold, cruel-eyed predators
dressed up as a nice interior design feature whose creator perhaps hoped for a
touch of the Nibelungenlied. Sadly they really looked like they’d emerged from
a job lot in an out-of-town DIY store whose wares were bedded down on an
industrial estate. Perhaps it was the same place from where the tables were
torn from their womb.
As I waited
to be served by waiters who rushed about, their trays held high, leathery,
battered money bags hanging like ancient sporrans on their aprons, I continued
to look: the floors were tiled, sounding boards against which clicked the
waiters’ heels.
The men,
and yes, they were all men as far as I could see, were typically European (no
New World have-a-nice-day schmoozing here) in their froideur, imperious and the
very opposite of idle in the rush with which they scurried about, holding trays
studded with glasses of the rich dark lager brewed somewhere else within the
building. Somewhere in the building, somewhere near and yet far, somewhere this
beer that I hadn’t tried was brewed within the building.
I tried to
catch one’s eye.
A chap of
medium height stalking the next row of tables, looking about, CCTV on two legs,
short stubbly hair, cropped almost to the scalp, saw me. He reached the end of
the row, turned left and approached. I was reminded of the waiters in the Alt
beer-halls of Dusseldorf — hard faced, attitudinal, fast movers, forever
hunting for customers, with the glacial calmness of supermodels, leaving you
gratified that they haven’t been rude. I presume they worked on being paid for
every beer sold. The law of the jungle, Darwinian, brought to the pub. No
matter. At last I was going to try a beer that had haunted me ever since
reading about it within the pages of Michael Jackson’s books on beer (that’s
the beer hunting guy from Yorkshire who died in 2007, not the former child star
who became a man child and died in 2009). This was my fourth visit to the city
and with a bit of time and being on my own for once, cut off from the usual
press pack I normally turned up with, I was not to be denied.
As I
anticipated my beer the evening’s entertainment begun: a
scowling, mustachioed accordionist stood in the doorway and started to play the
melody from Que Sera Sera. As his fingers jabbed away with a mesmeric fluidity,
the newsreel that still existed in one part of my brain uncovered an image of
Doris Day singing the same song in some film from the 1950s. It was a surreal
memory that I shook away with the natural ease of a large dog shuddering itself
after emerging from a dip in the river.
Dressed in
Rupert Bear-style checked trousers and wearing a cap of indeterminate shape, it
seemed to me that the accordionist had the air of a 19th century
Corsican bandit albeit with a general comical air of buffoonish villainy. He
was meant for a bad opera.
I had seen
a similarly dressed chap with an accordion the previous year in the courtyard
at the Museum of Plzen. The musician there was less comically menacing. He was
older, slightly comforting in a grandfatherly sort of way, though also dressed
in the same style of chintzy, cushion covered furnishings as the man in U
Fleku. When the chap in Plzen played away I was struck by the fact that none of
the journalists I was with wanted to look directly at him. I certainly didn’t.
It was as if we were embarrassed for him, but on another level as the notes
squeezed themselves out of the instrument, a flurry of folkloric tunes that
sounded vaguely familiar, I made a joke about how we should be in a tavern in
Where Eagles Dare. We could have been in Bavaria.
Meanwhile,
back in U Fleku the beer arrived. It was creamy and dark with satisfying notes
of licorice and mocha coffee, all held together with a sparkling condition that
gave it a beautiful drinkability along with a deft dab of bitterness in the
finish. As I let the beer transport me into a different state of reverie, the
man with the air of a 19th century Corsican bandit finished his song, slung his
accordion on his shoulder like it was the sort of bag that usually held shot
pigeons and other game and began to root through his pocket. He brought out
what I presumed was loose change and looked at it in a meaningful way, occasionally
glancing up at the drinkers in the room.
The table
opposite me, in the next row, was home to another young couple, Italian I
guessed from the few scattered scraps of conversation that came my way. One of
the imperious waiters approached them, an approach that I noted was strangely
unhurried in its gait though still possessing a briskness that seemed to say
‘hurry up, eat your food, drink your beer, tip me and then leave’. He handed
down two plates filled with a bomb-site of Czech cuisine: a mound of dumplings,
red cabbage, gleaming and steaming, a monstrous cut of pork with a knife
stabbed into the top. The waiter also had a bottle of liqueur and two small
glasses on his tray. He poured a tot into each, the liquid as green as the
weeds waving in the current beneath the surface of a river that would gladly
take any Cordelia into its embrace. The couple demurred but then accepted what
seemed like a gift. Did they know that this drink would be added to their bill
and was one of the practices of U Fleku that guide books warned about?
Meanwhile,
the accordionist was still looking through the coins in his hand. Was this a
big hint that the meagre audience should be lobbing money his way? As the
waiters continued to roam up and down poking menu cards in the air possibly in
the hope of summoning diners out of nowhere while flourishing silver trays of
the local liqueur for more victims, I thought that for them and the snarling
accordionist it was going to be a long night. Time to leave. I was due at U Medviku
very shortly but more importantly I had an early start in the morning.
I finished
my glass and covered it with a beer mat (as one does in places like this) and
beckoned a waiter. I wanted to pay and leave. The drinking culture of the
this part of the world is replete with all manner of symbols and behavioral tics: for
instance in 19th century Prague, as Peter Demetz wrote in Prague in
Black and Gold, ‘Waitresses made a little cross on the wooden top of the mug,
the assumption being that nobody would be satisfied with one beer alone and
that it would be difficult later to account for the many consumed (the custom
has endured: present day waiters make pencil marks on the round cardboard
coasters for the beer glasses).’ So that was why I covered my beer with a beer
mat, I didn’t want any more. I had been to U Fleku and it was doubtful I would
return on my own again.
So why did
I go? Everyone — it was said, I had been told, I had read — must go to this pub
at least once on their visit to Prague. The attraction? Beer was obviously one,
being brewed on site, while the rumbustious beer-hall nature of the place added
another cog in the machine that drives the attraction of Prague. Roll out the
barrel in a central European fashion: drink lashings of beer, fill your stomach
with meat and dumplings and tell the folks back home where you went (and of
course don’t forget to pick up a postcard and jot down the impressions of a
city that until 1989 was well off the beaten track).
Then
there’s the pull and pause of antiquity: beer has been brewed here since the
late Middle Ages. So when you sit down for a beer at U Fleku you are merely the
latest in a long shuffling line of drinkers to come through the door.
As I sat at my
is-it-antique-or-not table I had read in my Rough Guide to the Czech Republic
that 1499 was the date when brewing commenced at U Fleku, a time when Bohemia
was under the lock and key of the Polish monarch. It was also a time when the
ravage and rage of the Hussite Wars that had gutted the earlier years of the 15th
century had finally spent themselves with the finality of a drunk who could
drink no more.
1499 was the year when a local
man with the name of Vít Skřemenec, a
man who made his living malting barley for brewing beer, bought the place. And
who was this chap whose footprint on the historical stage of Prague left such a
time-shaded mark? He is in good company with the massive majority of folk
around this time in that we do not know much about him apart from his name;
that has survived but nothing remains of his history. He is amongst a unique club. The overwhelming majority of
humanity that has ever lived is well and utterly forgotten.
We can
speculate with the idleness that velvet smooth caresses an evening spent
chatting in the pub with a glass in front and friends all around. Was he a man
in search of a fortune? Or was he just a man, a businessman perhaps (or what
passed for a businessman at the start of the modern age — Columbus had
‘discovered’ America in 1492, a date as good as any to announce,
retrospectively, as the end of the middle ages), who thought it sensible to
combine the first step of beer making with the rest of the process, to have
everything under the roof? If it was the latter then this was an early example
of rationalisation in the Prague beer market, something of which Czech brewing
has known a lot about in the decades since the country rejoined the west.
So with this sense of antiquity it’s not
surprising to discover that U Fleku claims to be one of Prague’s oldest pubs
and brewpubs, with, it is claimed, I have written, I have believed, over 500
years of brewing the same dark beer (until the 1840s the vast majority of beers
brewed in Bohemia would have been dark so the claim for the colour might not be
so outlandish). It is a place that with the add-on of antiquity probably
welcomed all manner of Czech drinking celebrities down through the years; this is
where the great and good all came, it is said, names and fame trailing in their
wake, a glass of beer to sate their thirst. Though I
cannot help wondering if, before the Czech national awakening of the 19th
century, perhaps German would have been the language that people used to ask
for beer? And what about the years between 1939 and 1945 — the language of the
occupier would I guess have been heard more than not.
Into these
rooms, I know for certain that Ema Destinnova came, the great opera singer
remembered with a mixture of sadness and joy at the Smetana Museum down on the
city’s river Vltava. She apparently would occasionally pop into U Fleku for a
cheeky half of Pivo. The idea of her dolled up to the heavens as a Valkyrie singing
Wagner with a massive foaming flagon of beer propping up her sense of
soprano-laden excellence gathers the imagination and rockets it to some sort of
moon where the bars are open all day and there’s Wagner on tap, usually the
Prelude from Tristan und Isolde. She was also the owner of a brewery when the
congregational clasp of a stroke embraced her in 1930. The death and the
silence occurred in Ceske Budjovice, home of the Budvar brewery (the
coincidance of a branch falling off the tree and landing a beer connection is
not lost on one). So I don’t feel that history won’t crack with the thought of
her enjoying a Pivo at U Fleku, Wagnerian outfit or not.
Yet she was
long gone, Time in a beer-hall is the same as time in a bar as is time in a
pub, as is time spent in any place where people gather — this time well-spent
is the engine of thought and 500 years of brewing and serving pivo is well
worth thinking about. What did it mean?
1499 is
close to the acknowledged start of the modern world in Western Europe, several
decades after the fall of Constantinople, when the Ottomans’ cannons breached
the walls of the last remains of the old eastern part of the Roman Empire. A
new world had opened out to the west, over the ocean, and gold and silver and
slaves would soon be kegged into galleons and flowing back to Europe.
Then I
thought 1599. Europe in conflict as catholic kings and protestant princes
jostled for power. The Defenestration of Prague and the Battle of the White
Mountain existed a couple of decades away, bringing with them the decline of
Bohemia. And on the throne of England an elderly queen sat while the Spanish
empire was about to enter its twilight of decline.
1699.
Europe on the edge of the enlightenment though the coming century would still
see men being torn apart for crimes that the state deemed beyond the realm of
sense, such as in the case of the regicide Robert-François Damiens. He had
attempted to assassinate Louis XV in 1757 and after been found guilty was
tortured and dismembered by four horses (though it is said an axe helped to
sever his limbs). ‘Today is going to be a hard day,’ he is supposed to have
said on the morning of his execution. There’s a man with an iron-like sense of
fatality, which I can only salute.
1799 was
the age of revolution as it ebbed away to the age of authoritarianism, every
corporal with a marshal’s field baton in his knapsack. Armies of Europe on the
tramp, though Prague was mainly spared from the fires of war.
1899, ah
that’s nearer, fin de siecle, Oscar Wilde dying swamped in poverty in Paris,
the Czech lands revival. Hold on, in a few years time, who’s that down-at-heel
Prague citizen trying to sell dodgy greyhounds before the nations of Europe
grasp each other in a strictly balletic dance of death.
In the
following years the Czech nation found freedom only to lose it again within a
generation and I imagine the people who might have come through the doors, sat
down and ordered the beer in those days. And one man comes out of the darkness,
the devil’s advocate, an easy reptilian smile, to be extinguished with the
throw of a grenade and revenged with the death of thousands and the destruction
of Lidice, a village whose ultimate destination was the end. Heydrich, his
death’s head cap carelessly flung in a corner with a host of others. And does
Patrick Leigh Fermor give us a glimpse of what U Fleku might have looked like
then, on a passage on drinking beer in a Bavaria beer-hall in his masterpiece
of sore feet and worn leather, A Time of Gifts?
‘I strayed
by mistake into a room full of SS officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannfuhrers,
black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath
the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones
caps.’
And then
the German speakers who vanished in 1945/6, an exodus that many still today
would speak of as just punishment for their actions.
1999, Havel
was still in the Hrad, and communist unitarianism had been driven into the
ground, while U Fleku had now struck a commonplace concord with the ravening
hordes from the west. It was on the tourist trail, a trail that I was now
treading. And the tourist in me knew that I was offered eight lounges and
restaurant rooms that if they weren’t in magical Prague would be seen as living
breathing suburban rooms decorated with mock Gothic fantasies. But there is
still the beer — and if you’re going to go to a tourist trap it’s worth going
to one with a decent beer on tap.
Beer has
always been big in Prague. Writing in 1967 Joseph
Wechsberg recalled that ‘When I lived in Prague between the two world wars,
beer was an important topic of conversation: what kind of beer, when to drink
it, how to drink it. My friends talked about beer as knowingly as the people in
Burgundy talk about their wines. Everybody had their own special beer, in some
favourite haunt, where the beer was drawn from the barrel (bottled beer was for
people who did not know better).’
Meanwhile,
in his perceptive essay Pivo at the Heart of Europe, Timothy O Hall starts off
with a quote: ‘A Czech never says that he’s going out to have “a few beers”,
and he never counts the beers while he’s having them. You go out for a beer. A
beer is like a woman: when you’re with a woman, you never think of women you
have been with before, and you never think of the next woman. It would be
disrespectful. It’s the same with a beer. You go out and you have one beer… and
maybe, when the unfortunate time comes that you reach the end of your
relationship with your beer, then maybe you’ll have another.’
And what
did I think of beer? I had been drinking it since I was 16, not
always enjoying it at first, adding lemonade (bitter top), making it sweeter,
making it stronger (a depth charge of Jamesons into a pint of Guinness in a pub
in Lower Baggot Street in Dublin); from a bottle, from a glass, from a can,
and, latterly as beer writing took hold, from a tank in the brewery, from the
source, fresh and alive, the primary colours of beer. So what did I think of
beer?
Sometimes
the beer in the glass that I drank was brisk and busy, but not too busy, with
bubbles drifting to the top, ease in their ascension, an escalator upwards of
carbonation and friskiness (a young pup perhaps, eager to play and gain
approval); and above them, the place into which they merged and morphed, the
snow white collar of foam, a Table Mountain of ultimate achievement.
And the
colour of the beer in the glass? Some would say the pale gold of a ring forged
in an ancient mine high in the mysterious mountains of a long disappeared
people’s legends. Or maybe it was the sum of the egg yolk sun that inched
itself, fingers tensed on the ledge of morning, gaining strength and confidence
as it emerged into the day. Others will think of an heirloom — an old sideboard
willed by a much loved great aunt, the burnish of dark chestnut on its surface,
a gleam, but also the dream of childhood’s end.
Then there
is a beer that is stygian, the knife of night cutting into the soft underbelly
of the day, pray please pay the ferryman for his work in transporting us into
the dark where no stars fall and no moon rises. And let us not forget the beer
in the glass the colour of a piece of amber that emerged into the light of the
world after spending millennia with an insect in its craw, and then by man’s
hand was polished and perfected like some jewel in the crown.
So there
was the beer, the beer in the glass, a sparkling ring of confidence surrounding
and circling, an orbit of sensation, the bite of flavour on the palate, on the
tongue and in the mouth; there it was, the thirst quenching draught of beer
that covers all the sensory nodes that sit on the tongue, serious scholars in
judgment, the Academy in congress about this work of art. The wash of
sweetness, but not too sweet, a sweetness restrained, belt buckled in; the
splash of fruit — tropical, citrus, soft — the crisp crunch of the malted
barley’s influence, a ghost from the field where thousands of stalks swelled
beneath the summer sun or shivered and sold themselves dearly when the fret
rolled in from the north. The hop? There it was, the essence of fruit, as
recalled above, but also the rasp of bitterness at the end of the throat,
sometimes a stick rattling on a tin roof, other times, as pithy as a Wildean
quote recovered, dusted down and thrown out into the sunlight. Then the beer
was finished, Sahara dry perhaps, the return of a bounty of fruit, windfalls in
the orchard, just brief, a glimpse, a flash (the green ray perhaps, glimpsed
over the still ocean), before the beer vanished into legend.
And if we
really think about it; if we really let ourselves think about the beer that we
have just drunk, the beer that we have fallen in love with, this is the beer
that brings the chimes of midnight closer with every sip or slurp, and every
beer we devour and fall in love with must bring us closer to heaven.
So what did
I think of beer?
When I think
about it, safe in the lounge that is labeled retrospection, my snap decision
plan for a visit to U Fleku had started so promisingly. From the outside the look of U Fleku said lager: a homely
Bavarian pension, long slung, longhouse-like almost in the Devon style, gabled
windows like eyebrows, a massive pastiche of a carriage clock hanging from the
marigold yellow facade. This for me conveyed a sort of Mitteleuropa
steadfastness perhaps, but there was also a sense of Germanic camp, which was
perhaps exaggerated for me at the entrance when a tall chap in a suit, looking
suitably officious and a little supercilious (I had a rucksack and it was
obviously that I was travelling), said something, possibly good evening, and I
blurted out Pivo. I didn’t want to eat, but just try the beer and I was directed
into the room where an accordionist lurked with the look of an 19th
century Corsican bandit.
For him as
I found out, it was going to be a long night… for me it was the start of a
journey that I hoped would make the beer I drank more than just the beer I
drank.
