Beer with Havel, Part Three

So where did the playwright-essayist-poet-dissident and first President of the CzechRepublic come in? Rachel’s predilection for molding minds never faded, nor did her taste for adventure. Ten years after she was unceremoniously prodded out of teaching in the New York City public school system- carted away as it were kicking and screaming because of a mandatory retirement age of seventy- she happened on a new opportunity that trumped even some of her previous madcap flings. After she was forced out of the job she remained in the city for a couple of years, did a bit of traveling to the usual places, spoke nostalgically of having done the fox trot with a hulking and totally charming Irishman she met in the lounge of one of the hotels but she eventually relocated to the college town that housed the Ivy where her son-in-law was a professor. True to form, she did not fall into the placid way of reading novels and munching bonbons but quickly became involved in tutoring adults learning English as a second language. This newfound way of being kept her occupied for a number of years, and when I visited I noticed that her digs, though smaller and simpler in style, still had her unmistakable mark with a huge and rather wild oil of vaguely Jackson Pollack-ish demeanor covering the better part of a wall, and a stack of the latest reads in hardcover sitting slightly askew on an end table, waiting for her attention. Between her intermittent visits back to the city- which created small bouts of cyclonic activity that usually left me dazed and enervated- along with her dozens of new friends and interesting teaching gig, for a while she seemed quite content. Around her eightieth birthday however she finally surrendered to the urge of creating some real excitement by enlisting in a program through something like the Peace Corps that ultimately sent her and all of her eight decades to Czechoslovakia. Apparently a few of her adult students were from the region and had piqued her interest. Glasnost was still in its childhood, tourists were not hitting the spot in droves yet, and to this inveterate arm chair wanderer the idea seemed quite exotic. Though not a great traveler myself, a passing acquaintance with the narratives of Kundera had me picturing cool Slav hipsters clad in black on black who were intensely interested in the unbearable lightness of being and other existential conundrums of the late twentieth century, abstract conflicts which though I did not entirely understand, I admired. She applied for admission, and during the screening process Rachel was advised that among her application requirements she would have to submit to an HIV blood test; as she recounted the story later, her response to the screeners was that she was “truly flattered;” needless to say, she passed the interview with flying colors and the laughs were thrown in free of charge. Vaclav Havel was the Big Thing in the news in those times with everyone who had even a vague interest in theater or politics or both scooping up his biography, and naturally she managed to make contact with the colorful artist turned politician himself. When she returned after about six or seven months with tales of stark conditions, spartan accommodations, bad food and the pervasive nicotine addiction of Eastern Europeans, she said these small inconveniences, annoying though they could be, were nicely tempered by having gotten to hang out in some dark, smoky, former Eastern bloc beer joint with the legendary leader of the Czech political avant-garde, swilling hops and talking about god knows what; needless to say, he was “wonderful” and “electrifying,” with “a great sense of humor” and yet “down to earth. . . .”