The habit of sending out for vursty was as firmly planted and widespread as the English habit of drinking tea at certain hours. Around ten thirty in the morning the lowliest apprentice or janitor in every office, shop, factory, or government bureau would make the round of all employees, from salesgirl to general manager, and ask each of them what he wanted, and a while later he would return with many small packages. All work stopped, and fat stains began to appear on papers all over the city.
In those days I worked in a lawyer's office, after I had graduated, to my family's and my own surprise, from Prague University's Law School. I usually spent my mornings in court, pleading the cause of some unworthy individual who happened to be our client. Around ten the court would adjourn and the judge would retreat for fifteen minutes to his chambers, where he would sit at his table, surrounded by law books, eating a couple of vursty, which were properly wrapped in paper. I would go down with my adversary or with the district attorney with whom I had just exchanged verbal insults to the small uzenarna which was installed on the ground floor of the court building, or we would have the attendant fetch our vursty and then eat them in the rear of the courtroom with the plaintiff and the defendant. During those ten minutes all actions and emotions stood still, tempers cooled, and many a settlement was reached later.
I spent my evenings at the Prager Tagblatt, an influential daily whose editors and contributors looked upon their paper as the Times of Prague. News-papermen work late, and most sausage shops closed at eight or nine in the evening, but there was a uzenarna across from the Tagblatt Building which opened in the evening at eight and remained open all night for the convenience of newspapermen, night-club employees, prostitutes, street cleaners, and taxi drivers.
Newspapermen the world over are devotees of strong, hot, black coffee, but the newspapermen in Prague were the only ones who ate hot vursty or parky with their coffee. The dean of the Tag-blatt's editorial writers, Professor Steiner, a widely renowned scholar of Greek and Latin who had exchanged his teacher's platform for the more important rostrum of the paper's front page, was often seen evenings nervously pacing the corridors between nine and ten, muttering Greek curses at passers-by. Alarmed visitors were quick to deduce that another political crisis bad broken out somewhere and that the professor was trying to work out his thoughts for a last-minute editorial. Actually he was only waiting nervously for the arrival of Becvar, the copy boy, with his vursty and a big glass of beer.
Beer was the only other acceptable drink with hot sausages. In Prague's uzenarna circles wine drinkers were as suspect as Communists are today in Washington. Wine drinkers were considered quaint, not to be trusted, potential sources of danger. All beer was tap beer; the local patrons took a dim view of bottled beer, which was proclaimed inferior, “good only for export.” The sausage shops had no license to sell tap beer, but there was sure to be a beer parlor next door or a few doors farther away. A sausage shop always lay strategically between two beer parlors; or, as the beer drinkers would have it, each beer parlor was in a tactical position between two sausage shops. Either the sausage shop would send a girl out for beer—it was sold in heavy glasses with heavy handles and an experienced girl was able to carry from six to eight in one hand—or the beer parlor would send a piccolo over with the beer. At certain hours of the day the streets of Prague were animated by white-coated shop girls and tuxedoed piccolos bearing beer glasses.
When Prague's sausage addicts grew tired of arguing over what kind of sausage to eat, they would start to fight over what beer to drink. Outside the country the beer of Pilsen was best known, but there were many experts in Prague who disliked its strong, bitter aftertaste. and preferred another brand, such as Tomas, Budejovske, or Velke Popovice. One of the greatest beer philosophers, the author Jaroslav Hasek, who wrote most of his book The Good Soldier Schweik in a beer parlor, claimed the beer of Smichov, a Prague suburb, to be the best. But, Pilsen or Smichov, there was never any agreement as to whether beer should be poured gently into the slightly bent glass or poured into it from high above.
To the Czechs dumplings were as important as rice to the Chinese and macaroni to the Italians. There was no meal without dumplings, and sometimes there was no course without them. Dumplings showed up in the soup; they were made of ground liver and rice or of ground meat, bread crumbs, marrow, greaves, ham, or potatoes. Dumplings instead of potatoes were served with the entrée; they were called houskove knedliky, “bread dumplings,” because they contained small cubes of sautéed bread. And dumplings were also the most popular dessert. Czech housewives talked about kuedliky knowingly and in highly technical terms—“I steam them in a napkin,” “I use farinaceous potatoes”—which were as unintelligible to foreigners as the mysteries of Czech grammar, which, for instance, has seven cases of declension.
A nation dedicated to the cult of dumplings was not diet-conscious and had no desire to reduce. Prague's women, known all over Europe for their charm, sex appeal, and vivacity, were rarely slim and long-stemmed. Eating dumplings was the favorite national indoor pastime; to be able to eat twenty or thirty dumplings in one sitting was considered a proud feat of virility.
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