Utz

by Bruce Chatwin

  The occupation of Czechoslovakia had been completed in a day.

  I humped my bag up the stairs of the Hotel Louisiane and told myself, sadly, that Utz had been right. In December I sent another Christmas card. I never had an answer.

  Dr Orlík, on the other hand, was a positive nuisance. Always in a semi-legible scrawl, always on the notepaper of the National Museum, he pestered me for photostats of scientific articles. He commanded me to trace the whereabouts of some mammoth bones in the Natural History Museum. He demanded books: nothing cheap of course, usually monographs published at great expense by American university presses.

  One letter informed me of his current project: a study of the house-fly (Musca domestica), as painted in Dutch and Flemish still-lifes of the seventeenth century. My role in this enterprise was to examine every photograph of paintings by Bosschaert, Van Huysum or Van Kessel, and check whether or not there was a fly in them.

  I did not reply.

  About six years later, towards the end of March 1974, I received from Orlík a black-bordered card on which he had scrawled: ‘Our beloved friend Utz is dead . . .’

  The word ‘beloved’ seemed a bit strong: considering I had known Utz for a total of nine and a quarter hours, some six and a half years earlier. All the same, remembering how devoted the two friends were, I sent a short note thanking Orlík for the news, and hoping to share his sorrow.

  This produced a flood of even more unreasonable demands. Would I send $1,000 U.S. to help the researches of a poor scholar? Would I agree to sponsor a six-month tour of Western scientific institutions? Would I send forty pairs of socks?

  I sent four pairs.

  The correspondence dried up.

  At the end of last summer I happened to pass through Prague on my way back from the Soviet Union. The mood, especially in smaller cities along the Volga and Don, struck me as exceptionally buoyant. The Soviet education system, I felt, had worked all too well: having created, on a colossal scale, a generation of highly intelligent, highly literate young people who were more or less immune to the totalitarian message.

  Prague was infinitely more mournful and gloomy. There were plenty of things in the shops: but the shoppers mooched up and down Wenceslas Square with the faces of a people disgusted with itself for having, if temporarily, lost hope. The works of the ‘Prag-Deutsch Schriftsteller’, Franz Kafka, were unavailable in the bookstores. Monuments likely to be the focus of national sentiment – the Týn Church or St Vitus’s Cathedral – were closed for reconstruction. Their façades had vanished under a blight of rusty scaffolding – although very few workmen could be seen.

  It was impossible to drive anywhere without being blocked by a ‘road up’ sign. The entire city – labyrinthine at the best of times – had been turned into a labyrinth of culs-de-sac. I had the impression of a mercantile city in mourning, not so much for its lost prosperity as the loss of its European role. It was a city at the end of its tether.

  I am being unfair. Everywhere in Prague there were signs that the Czechs were uncrushable.

  I think it was Utz who first convinced me that history is always our guide for the future, and always full of capricious surprises. The future itself is a dead land because it does not yet exist.

  When a Czech writer wishes to comment on the plight of his country, one way open to him is to use the fifteenth-century Hussite Rebellion as a metaphor. I found in Prague Museum this text describing the Hussites’ defeat of the German Knights:‘At midnight, all of a sudden, frightened shouting was heard in the very centre of the large forces of Edom who had put up their tents along three miles near the town of Žatec in Bohemia; in the distance of ten miles from Cheb. And all of them fled from the sword, driven out by the voice of falling leaves only, and not pursued by any man . . .’

  As I scribbled this in my notebook, I seemed to hear again Utz’s nasal whisper: ‘They listen, listen, listen to everything but . . . they hear nothing!’

  He had, as usual, been right. Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber; a void where confused signals buzz about at random; where a murmur or innuendo causes panic: so, in the end, the machinery of repression is more likely to vanish, not with war or revolution, but with a puff, or the voice of falling leaves . . .

  I was staying at the Hotel Yalta. Among the guests there was a French reporter on the trail of a Peruvian terrorist. ‘Many terrorists come to Prague,’ he said, ‘for facial surgery.’

  There was also a party of English ‘dissidentwatchers’ : a Professor of Modern History and three literary ladies — who, instead of watching animals in an East African game-park, had come to spy on that other endangered species, the East European intellectual. Was the creature still at large? What should one feed it? Would it compose some suitable words to help the anti-Communist crusade?

  They drank whisky on their credit cards, ate a lot of peanuts, and plainly hoped they were being followed. I hoped that, when they did meet a dissident, they’d get their fingers bitten off.

  On the following day, I checked for an Utz in the Prague phone book. There was no one of that name.

  I ventured past the sickly stucco medusa-masks above the door of No. 5 Široká Street, past the ranks of overflowing dustbins in the entrance, and rang the bell of the top-floor apartment. Beside the bell-push, I saw the screw-holes where Utz’s brass plaque had been.

  On the landing below, I tried the bell of the soprano who, twenty years earlier, had appeared in a peonyprinted peignoir. She was now a shrivelled old lady in a black, fringed shawl. I said the name ‘Utz’. The door flew in my face.

  I had got as far as the next floor when the door re-opened and, with a ‘Psat!’, she called me back.

  Her name was Ada Krasová. The apartment was crammed with the mementos of an operatic career.

  She had sung Mimi, Manon, Carmen, Aida, Ortrud and Lisa in ‘The Queen of Spades’. One photograph showed her as an adorable Jenůfa in a lace peasant blouse. She kept fingering the tortoiseshell combs in her hair. In the kitchen a cat was being sick. There were arrangements of peacock feathers in Chinese vases. The profusion of faded pink satin reminded me of Utz’s bedroom.

  I came quickly to the point. Did she, by any chance, know what had happened to Utz’s porcelains? She gave a little operatic trill, ‘Oooh! La! La!’ – and shuddered. Obviously she did know, but was not letting on. She gave me the name of a curator at the Rudolfine Museum.

  The museum, a grandiose edifice from the ‘good old days’ of Franz Josef, had been named after the Emperor Rudolf to commemorate his passion for the decorative arts. Along the front facade, there were sculptured bas-reliefs representing various crafts: gem-cutting, weaving, glass-blowing. A pair of grimy sphinxes sat guard over the entrance; burdocks were sprouting through cracks in the steps.

  The Museum was shut for ‘various reasons’ — as it had been shut in 1967. Only one room, on the ground floor, was open for temporary exhibitions. The current show was called ‘The Modern Chair’ — with student copies after Rietveld and Mondrian, and a display of stacking chairs in fibreglass.

  At the reception desk I asked to speak to the curator.

  Prague is hardly a stone’s throw, culturally, from Dresden. I knew that if I posed as an expert on Meissen porcelain, they would soon call my bluff. So I cooked up a likely tale: I was a historian of the Neapolitan Rococo and was writing a paper on the Commedia dell’ Arte figurines of the CapodiMonte factory. I had once seen Mr Utz’s lovely group ‘The Spaghetti Eater’. Was there any way of knowing where it was?

  A subdued female voice on the end of the line murmured, ‘I will come down.’

  I had to wait ten minutes before a homely, middle-aged woman stepped from the lift. Her head was wrapped in a deep lilac scarf, and there was a wen on her chin. She drew back her lips in a covert smile.

  ‘It would be better,’ she said in English, ‘if we went outside.’

  We strolled along the embankment of the Vltava. The day was cold and drizzly, and the clouds seemed t
o touch the spire of St Vitus’s Cathedral. It was one of the worst summers on record. Mallard drakes were chasing ducks in the shallows. A man was fishing from an inflatable rubber dinghy moored in midstream, with the kittiwakes wheeling round him.

  ‘Tell me,’ I broke the silence, ‘why is your museum always shut?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ She let out a quick, throaty laugh. ‘To keep the People out!’

  She gave a furtive glance over her shoulder, and asked: ‘You have known Mr Utz?’

  ‘I knew him,’ I replied. ‘Not well. I once spent an evening with him. He showed me the collection.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘1967.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she shook her head forlornly. ‘Before our tragedy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I always wondered what became of the porcelain.’

  She winced. She took half a step forward, a full step sideways, and then leaned against the balustrade, apparently uncertain how to phrase her next question:

  ‘Do I think correctly that you know the market of Meissen porcelains? In Western Europe and America?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Then you are not a collector?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or a dealer?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Then you have not come to Prague to buy pieces?’

  ‘God forbid!’

  My answer seemed to disappoint her. I had a presentiment she was going to offer to sell me Utz’s porcelains. She exhaled a deep breath before continuing.

  ‘Can you tell me,’ she asked, ‘have pieces from the Utz Collection been sold in the West?’

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  A month or so earlier, I had called on Dr Marius Frankfurter in New York, in his overstuffed apartment a-twitter with Meissen birds. ‘Find me the Utz Collection,’ he had said, ‘and we will make ourselves really rich.’

  ‘No,’ I said to the curator. ‘If anyone knew, it would be Utz’s old dealer friend, Dr Frankfurter. He said it was a total mystery.’

  ‘Oh, I see!’ She looked down at the water. ‘So you know Dr Frankfurter?’

  ‘I’ve met him.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘it is also a mystery to us.’

  ‘How is that?’

  She shuddered, and fumbled with the knot of her scarf: ‘All those beautiful pieces . . . ! They have gone . . . How would you say it? . . . Vanished!’

  ‘Vanished?’ I could hear the air whistling through my teeth.

  ‘Vanished!’

  ‘After his death? Or before?’

  ‘We do not know.’

  Until 1973, the year of Utz’s stroke, the museum officials were in the habit of paying routine calls on him: to check that the collection was intact.

  The visits seemed to amuse him: especially when one or other of the curators brought a puzzling piece of porcelain, on which to test his expertise. But in July of that year, his right arm paralysed, he agreed to sign a paper confirming that, on his death, the collection would go to the State.

  He also agreed to import his ‘second’ collection from Switzerland: with the proviso that, since the visits now distressed him terribly, they would leave him thereafter in peace. The Director of the Museum, a humane man, consented. Two hundred and sixtyseven objects of porcelain were given special clearance through the customs, and were delivered to Utz’s apartment.

  The funeral, as we know, began at 8 a.m. on March 10th 1974 – although there was some confusion over the timing of the arrangements. As a result, the Director and three of his staff missed the church service and the burial altogether, and were thirty minutes late for breakfast at the Hotel Bristol.

  Two days later, when they kept their appointment at No. 5 Široká Street, no one answered the bell. In exasperation, they called for a man to pick the lock. The shelves were bare.

  The furniture was in place, even the bric-à-brac in the bedroom. But not a single piece of porcelain could be found: only dust-marks where the porcelains had been, and marks on the carpet where the animals from the Japanese Palace had stood.

  ‘And the servant?’ I asked. ‘Surely she must know?’

  ‘But we do not believe her story.’

  After breakfast next morning, I asked the concierge to call the National Museum to find out if a Dr Václav Orlík still worked there. The answer came back that Dr Orlík, although officially retired, continued to work in the mornings, in the Department of Palaeontology.

  On my way to the Museum I took the precaution of reserving a table for two at the Restaurant Pstruh.

  A museum guard conducted me through a maze of passages into a storeroom heaped with dusty bones and stones. Orlík, now white-haired and resembling a Brahmanic sage, was cleaning the encrustation from a mammoth tibia. Behind him, like a Gothic arch, was the jawbone of a whale.

  I asked if he remembered me.

  ‘Is it?’ he scowled. ‘No. It is not.’

  ‘It is,’ I said.

  He left off scouring the mammoth bone and examined me with a myopic and suspicious glare.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see it now. It is you.’

  ‘Of course it’s me.’

  ‘Why you not reply to my letters?’

  I explained that, since I was last in Prague, I had married and changed addresses five times.

  ‘I do not believe,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I wondered if you’d like to lunch with me?’ I said. ‘We could go to the Pstruh.’

  ‘We could go,’ he nodded doubtfully. ‘You could pay?’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘So I will come.’

  He made the motion of running a comb through his hair and beard, set his beret at a rakish angle, and pronounced himself ready to leave.

  On the way out he left a note saying that he had gone to lunch with a ‘distinguished foreign scholar’. We went outside. He walked with a limp.

  ‘I do not think you are distinguished,’ he said as he limped along the pedestrian underpass. ‘I think you are not a scholar even. But I must say it to them.’

  Nothing much had changed at the restaurant. The trout were still swimming up and down their oxygenated tank. The head-waiter – could it really be the same head-waiter? – had grown a balloon-like paunch, and the disagreeable face of Comrade Novotný had been replaced by the equally disagreeable face of Comrade Husák.

  I ordered a bottle of light white Moravian wine, and raised my glass to Utz’s memory. Tears trickled down the creases of Orlík’s cheek, and vanished in the wilderness of his beard. I resigned myself to lunching with a tearful palaeontologist.

  ‘How are the flies?’ I asked.

  ‘I have returned to the mammoth.’

  ‘I mean your collection of flies.’

  ‘I have thrown.’

  The trout, this time, were available.

  ‘Au bleu, n’est-ce pas?’ I tried to imitate Utz’s weird French accent.

  ‘Blau!’ snapped Orlík, with a loud hoot of laughter.

  I leaned across, and asked in a lowered voice:

  ‘Tell me, what happened to the porcelains?’

  He closed his eyes, and tilted his head from side to side.

  ‘He has thrown,’ he said.

  ‘Thrown?’

  ‘Broken and thrown.’

  ‘He broke them?’ I gasped.

  ‘He broke and she broke. Sometimes he broke and she threw.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘The Baroness.’

  ‘What Baroness?’

  ‘His Baroness.’

  ‘I never knew he was married.’

  ‘He was married.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘He! He!’ Orlík cackled. ‘Guess it!’

  ‘How can I guess it?’

  ‘You have met the Baroness.’

  ‘I met no one.’

  ‘You have met.’

  ‘I have not met.’

  ‘You have met.’

  ‘Who was she?’

&nb
sp; ‘His domestic.’

  ‘Oh no! No. I don’t believe it . . . Not . . . Not Marta!’

  ‘As you say it.’

  ‘And you’re saying she destroyed the collection?’

  ‘I am saying and I am not saying.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Dead, maybe. Maybe not. She has gone.’

  ‘Out of the country?’

  ‘Not.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Into the country.’

  ‘Where in the country?’

  ‘Kostelec.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Süd-Böhmen.’

  ‘You say she went back to Southern Bohemia?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  ‘Tell me . . . ’

  ‘I cannot tell you,’ he whispered, ‘in here . . .’

  Until the end of lunch, Orlík entertained me with an evocation of the mammoth-hunters who had roamed the tundras of Moravia in the Ice Age.

  I paid the bill. We took a taxi to the Vrtba Garden where we sat on one of the terraces, beside a stone urn half-covered with a trailing vine.

  Utz married Marta at a civil ceremony one Saturday morning in the summer of 1952, six weeks after returning from Vichy.

  It was a dangerous moment. The Gottwald regime had let loose the self-perpetuating witch-hunt that culminated in the Slánský trial. It was almost impossible for ordinary citizens not to fall into one or other of the categories – bourgeois nationalist, traitor to the Party, cosmopolitan, Zionist, black-marketeer – that would land them in prison, or worse.

  If you happened to be Jewish and a survivor of the death-camps, this branded you as a Nazi collaborator.

  It was obvious to Utz that he would have to tread with great circumspection.

  One morning, an order came for him to quit the apartment within two weeks: as a single man, he was no longer entitled to two rooms, only to one.

  So it had come to this! He would be out on the street, or in some rotting garret with nowhere to store the porcelains. Marriage was the answer.