Absinthe

 

The first Czech painting I ever saw in the Czech Republic was The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva. I had just arrived in a bitterly cold Prague and my friend took me to Cafe Slavia to warm up. The Cafe, which sits opposite the National Theatre on the bank of the Vltava, had always been a meeting place for artists, writers and intellectuals and it was still. As my friend debated the future of the post-Communist Czechoslovakia with her friends, my eyes were drawn to a large painting on the wall opposite. A man sits at a table, head in hands, conversing with the green fairy of absinthe.

Viktor Oliva was a Czech art nouveau painter and illustrator who discovered the green spirit when he lived in the Bohemian quarter of Paris. He died in Prague twenty seven years after painting the work and is buried in Olsany Cemetery.

I came across absinthe again this year. I was walking around Jindrichuv Hradec and came upon a distillery of liqueurs. In the shop window was this bottle of their own brand of absinthe. Jindrichuv Hradec is known for its liqueurs. Another local company, Fruko Schulz, is one of the largest producers of liqueurs and spirits in the Czech Republic. But Hills, the distillery I discovered on my walk, is more of a family affair and invites you in for a tour to learn about distilling and indeed a tasting. As I was driving, I took this photo and hurried on before being tempted in.

As a footnote to this post, I was in the Krumlov Tesco supermarket before Christmas and bought my son a pack of absinthe chocolate. There was also a bar of cannabis chocolate, but I didn't think I would get that through customs!

Cafe Slavia

Cafe Slavia is to be found on the bank of the Vltava opposite the National Theatre. On the evening of my first day in Czechoslovakia nearly 20 years ago Cafe Slavia was full of people.

Cafe Slavia had long been the favourite watering hole of Prague's intelligensia - Kafka and Kundera have been among its customers. And it was also a favourite of the former Czech dissident leader and now president Vaclav Havel. Cafe Slavia then in early 1990 was a centre for those who were planning and executing the transformation of the newly democratised country. The cafe's Art Deco leather bank seating, cherrywood and onyx had been allowed to tarnish under the communists and yet the place shone with an energy that was almost palpable.

My puppeteer friend and I joined a group of her friends sitting in animated conversation, into which she soon was drawn. I sat, watched and listened to the flurry of a language I did not understand. I drank a cup of dark, thick Czech coffee and soon was intoxicated. Without language I was thrown back on my other senses, all of which seemed heightened by the apparent absence of the one.

Language is very important to me, but it exists on three levels. The first is that of conversation, the run-of-the-day exchange, and I am good at that, good at making people feel at ease, good at communicating what I wish and hiding the rest. The second is that of academic exactitude and arguing the case; three years at Oxford had honed this side of my language to a dagger point. And the last is something deeper. My parents tell me that as a small child even before I could read or write I composed poetry. This last level of language has a habit of tripping me up, starting as it does not in words but in rhythm. It is powerful and heady and something I resist until I can resist no longer. But most of the time it is drowned out by the hubbub of daily life. Here in the Cafe Slavia, drunk with the electricity in the air, I found that the conversation around me, stripped of meaningful words but full of exciting rhythyms and cadences, rang deep in that third level. It resonated inside me and something flexed like a Golem still unformed in Vltava mud.

Afterwards as we walked along the river to catch a tram to where I was staying I asked my friend about the one word I had made out in the multitude of others that evening. It had seemed to appear in every sentence, been the answer to every question. She smiled "Possibly," she said, "It means possibly." On that cold night in the early days following the Velvet Revolution everything was possible.