Mardi Gras the Czech Way
Mardi Gras the Czech Way
Slivovice in Děbolín
A doughnut does not a sustaining breakfast make, but a doughnut and a swig of moonshine is a different story. It’s Masopust, the Lenten Carnival season, and at 8 am in the local pub in Děbolín we knock back the first shots of the day, paint our faces, and layer our costumes over our coats.
The snow is as deep and as dense as packed brown sugar and rolls into the distance without end like a scene out of Doctor Zhivago. There are forty some-odd houses in this town, and the plan is to hit them all—sing a song, do a dance, take a shot—fueled by greasy jelly doughnuts, mayonnaise sandwiches, and glugs of slivovice, a crystal-clear liquor that doubles as a paint solvent, distilled from local plums and resurrected in unmarked bottles from the back of the villagers’ freezers. Na zdraví, we say, clinking glasses: “To your health.”
I have to wonder what the Czechs are letting go of when they celebrate their medieval Mardi Gras, because it’s not as if they hold something back the rest of the year. It isn’t, after all, as though theirs were a diet of kale and quinoa rather than cracklings and cream, of lard and fried cheeses and pork knuckle and potatoes twelve ways. As if their perfect pilsners weren’t their national treasure, their president not notorious for appearing inebriated before a crowd; as if my GP hadn’t prescribed a pint or two as a daily digestif. As if, in the land of pork and pleasure, there weren’t enough opportunities for revelry.
“The Czech Republic has made you an alcoholic,” my friend Honza teased recently over the third just-one-last drink of the night, a cocktail he’d brought with him from Moravia: beer, red wine, potato rum, Communist-knockoff Coke. Overkill, to be sure, but that’s part of the point.
And Honza’s right. Drinking it all in day after day, one’s senses get a little stunned by the dirty aroma of burning coal, the film-noir smog in the street, the pinup-girl curves of the river. Those sickly-sweet Necco-candy-colored facades on the buildings. The amber pilsners, capped with four fingers of foam like giant pill bottles choked with cotton balls. After one too many, I opt for a hair of the dog. Na zdraví, I tell Honza, stumbling over the words. Bottoms up.