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July 6th, 2008
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Around Town

Masked defector

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 6th, 2008 issue

It is a full train to Roztoky, and there’s more English spoken than Czech in our carriage. Turns out Roztoky’s celebration of Masopust is flagged as a cultural event for study-abroad students, and, near the train’s departure, a group of 30-odd young Americans flows on, abuzz.

Our host in Roztoky, a rapidly growing town perched on the side of a hill just north of Prague, had asked us to bring more people. My friends and I are sure this is not what he had in mind. We lower our voices, retreating from contact through mutual mumble.
No matter. It’s Masopust, the festival of excess, fat days before the lean times of Lent. We arrive in Roztoky and roll down to its small castle, the courtyard full of locals huddling in the cold early-afternoon sun.
I put on eye black first, giving me a raccoon look, followed by a golden mask, filigreed with purple. Later, I add sparkle hairspray.
It’s a wanting costume compared with those of other revelers: there are papier-mache horses and dragons and a Dionysus with wreathed head and a chain of sausage cycling through his mouth. There’s a Genghis Khan; a man as a Christmas tree, his date a present; children in fairy-tale costumes; and bears, for scaring the children. In the courtyard’s corner, a man sells sausages smoking in a trash can with stove pipe, a foreshadowing of other pig parts soon to come.
The crowd presses into a multistory open atrium to watch the first performance of what will become a parade. Children dressed in the black-and-white horizontal stripes of midshipmen gamely juggle and hop on unicycles, faltering often. One girl spins red-and-orange checkered flags to Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” which is a song about heroin.
The performance ends; we process the bone-bare chill in the air — it’s an early Easter and Lent this year — and head to a nearby restaurant for grog. We see the parade begin to pass by and join, marching to Roztoky center.
At one stop — there are many stops — we finally encounter our host, who tells us that the parade will continue to the high field that separates the town from neighboring Únětice, where we will meet Únětice’s parade like opposing armies in Braveheart. It’s the third year of the tradition, and everyone agrees it’s a quite good idea and they should keep it going.
We migrate from the parade’s tail to its vanguard and reach the fields. The parade fans out and we run parallel to a clutch of performers on stilts in black formal wear. They push an oversize baby carriage, complete with giant man-baby who has a beard and wears socks with sandals. One friend looks askance at the group. She has nightmares of men in black on stilts striding through barren fields. Later, I see one stilted man walk off the field to urinate.
The Nordic wind howls once we’re in the field. We’re freezing. Swigs of Fernet aren’t enough. There’s another interminable stop, which is enforced by the parade leader, who has a stop sign and a hectoring cadence for trespassers.
“We’re going to meet the other side at the horizon,” our host says.
 Not quickly enough. A consensus emerges and we push ahead of the parade for its final destination, a cow-barn-cum-bar in Únětice.
On the way down, we intercept the smaller Únětice parade, led by a man on a Segway with a large “ÚŇ” flag. I feel like a deserter, from one world war or another, retreating along a hedgerow. We’re told that Únětice met Roztoky at the peak of the high plain and engaged in a tug of war: men versus men, women versus women. It was a push, with both sides pulling out victories.
Later, in the barn, everyone takes off their masks. There, we eat pork.

Paul Voosen can be reached at pvoosen@praguepost.com


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