At the Golden Tiger (U Zlateho Tigra) in the back streets of old Prague on a Sunday in midsummer there are no tourists. The schoolroom benches along the back wall resound to the din of Czech voices, leaving no space for the casual visitor to squeeze in.
Overworked waiters scurry from beer-counter to customer with neither time nor inclination to explain the goings-on in English. The local Bohemians, swallowing their Pilsner Urquell, pumped ice-cold from the cellar, muse on the operations of the anti-terrorist police who just down the road on the previous Friday – in a Czech version of High Noon – burst into the headquarters of Investicni a Postovni Banka to impose a forced administration.
“Why the balaclavas, why the machine guns?”
asks a boatman from Podoli, swigging his Pilsner. “They were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”
“A complete waste of public money,” echoes a tax inspector from Josefov.
“Couldn’t they have sent a polite e-mail asking IPB employees to leave the bank quietly and please not press ‘delete’ on their computers?” volunteers a student of international relations at Charles University.
A bearded ancient who has been lending only half an ear to the conversation suddenly declares: “Bank clerks aren’t known for their violent tendencies.” This earns him and his mates a round of beer from a trio of bankers who are just leaving.
Randall Dillard – for it is he – is visiting from the Nomura office only 50 metres away. He isn’t the only American to have found this 13th-century beerhouse to his liking: Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright came here with Czech president Vaclav Havel in 1994. The two presidents happened to have saxophones handy and played an impromptu duet.
Today there is no music. But the bearded old man breaks into song in a watery but determined voice:
“We’re the boys who make the noise,Win the hearts of all the tarts,Draw our pay and then make hay.”
About 86 years ago – only a blip in the long history of Prague beerhouses – the good soldier Svejk (pronounced Schweik) was drinking beer down the road at The Chalice, which he preferred because it was quieter.
That day, June 28, Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. By a Turk? By a Serb? It was dangerous musings on this subject that led to Svejk’s arrest, his sojourn in jail and a lunatic asylum and his subsequent appointment as batman to a blasphemous army chaplain, who lost him at cards to an infantry lieutenant.
To please Lieutenant Lukas, his new boss, Svejk brought him a stolen dog. Unfortunately its owner, an irate colonel, spotted the lieutenant with the dog and as punishment sent him and Svejk off to the front at Ceske Budejovice. So Svejk embarked on his second military career.
It is not generally known that Svejk had a son. The child was conceived while Svejk was fulfilling the wishes – under orders – of one of Lieutenant Lukas’s ladies, the wife of a hop-merchant who had unexpectedly turned up at the lieutenant’s lodgings on the pretext of a shopping trip to Prague. Svejk hardly saw his offspring, who grew up in an orphanage in Moravia.
Svejk junior, now 85 years old, sits in the Golden Tiger and muses on his long life: he cheered the German army into Prague in 1939; he was in Stalingrad in 1942 as cannon-fodder in General Paulus’s Sixth Army. Luckily he was batman to an officer in the catering division and didn’t starve. Then he was a prisoner of war of the Russians before being sent home classified as “a complete idiot”. From 1945 until 1969, when he was expelled for “excessive zeal”, Svejk was a dedicated member of the Communist Party. He worked in the State Bank of Czechoslovakia from 1949 until 1974 as a doorman and general factotum.
Svejk also had a second career, inspired by his father, as a breeder of pedigree and not-so-pedigree dogs. He saw heroic action in the Prague Spring of 1968 defending his dogs against oncoming Soviet tanks. Shortly afterwards he was arrested on charges of profiteering and speculation, but, at his trial, was judged “weak-minded” and sent to an asylum. Those were the happiest days of his life.
This Svejk also had a son, Maximilian, born in 1958, who studied at the Prague School of Economics and followed his father into the State Bank. Since Max was such an agreeable fellow he was entrusted with designing an econometric model for the entire Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It proved conclusively that the Czechoslovak system was more efficient even than that of Prussia, or the German Democratic Republic as it was then known. His father’s reputation for “profiteering and speculation” stood him in good stead during the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He was invited to design a model of voucher privatization for Finance minister Vaclav Klaus.
Svejk did experiments on voucher privatization with dogs, on the basis that dogs exhibit in extreme form all the basic traits of human nature. Since the dogs – a wide-ranging sample from the stray population of Prague – quickly tore the vouchers to shreds, Svejk concluded that the programme would not work.
Unfortunately his Findings were not accepted by Klaus or anyone in the ministry of privatization – some of the dogs used had been Slovak, rather than Czech, they said – and the programme went ahead.
Now jobless, Maximilian was down at the Chalice one evening, happy to drink some Pilsner with Viktor, a banker from America.
They fell into conversation about greyhounds and the canine ability to handle privatization vouchers. Viktor saw an opportunity. The rest is history. And Max remains a great admirer of Viktor and Vaclav, who oiled the wheels of capitalism and opportunism in his country.
“I was happy to give my vouchers to Viktor for nothing, for the good of the Czech Republic,” he told Zdenek, who had just offered to put them in his private fund. Another evening at The Tulip he was drinking Staropramen with Ludek. “I will tell you about Libor and his interesting system of multiplication,” said Svejk. “You take a company or a bank. It has a board of directors who draw a salary. If you create a daughter company, that too has a board of directors who draw salaries and share options. The more companies you create, the more salaries and share options are paid out.
If I become a director of all these companies I can multiply my salary and share options many times.”
One day while they were sharing a bottle of Becherovka, Libor asked Svejk if he would like to help him – in the interests of the general economic good, of course.
“I want you to go on the board of some of my companies.”
“I will take no money from you, Libor. My father and his father before him were classified as complete idiots. I’ve been told many times that I’m no different.”
“You’re exactly right for the job,” said Libor. Svejk embraced Libor and his eyes Filled with tears.
