Utz (10 page)

‘But Frederick,' Utz fluttered his eyelids, ‘ . . . and with all that musical talent! . . . was really an absolute philistine!'

T
he room was almost in darkness. It was a warm night, and a soft breeze ruffled the net curtains. On the carpet, the animals from the Japanese Palace shimmered like lumps of phosphorescence.

‘Marta!' he called. ‘A light please!'

The maid came in with a Meissen candlestick, and set it carefully in the centre of the table. She put a match to the candle. Innumerable points of flame were reflected in the walls.

Utz changed the record on the gramophone: to the recitative of Zerbinetta and Harlequin from Strauss's ‘Ariadne auf Naxos'.

I have said that Utz's face was ‘waxy in texture', but now in the candlelight its texture seemed like melted wax. I looked at the ageless complexion of the Dresden ladies. Things, I reflected, are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more age-ing than a collection of works of art.

One by one, he lifted the characters of the Commedia from the shelves, and placed them in the pool of light where they appeared to skate over the glass of the table, pivoting on their bases of gilded foam, as if they would forever go on laughing, whirling, improvising.

Scaramouche would strum on his guitar.

Brighella would liberate people's purses.

The Captain would swagger childishly like all army officers.

The Doctor would kill his patient in order to rid him of his disease.

The coils of spaghetti would be eternally poised above Pulchinella's nostrils.

Pantaloon would gloat over his money-bags.

The Innamorata, like all transvestites everywhere, would be mobbed on his way to the theatre.

Columbine would be endlessly in love with Harlequin – ‘absolutely mad to trust him'.

And Harlequin . . .
The
Harlequin . . . the arch-improviser, the zany, trickster, master of the volteface . . . would forever strut in his variegated plumage, grin through his orange mask, tiptoe into bedrooms, sell nappies for the children of the Grand Eunuch, dance in the teeth of catastrophe . . . Mr Chameleon himself!

And I realised, as Utz pivoted the figure in the candlelight, that I had misjudged him; that he, too, was dancing; that, for him, this world of little figures was the real world. And that, compared to them, the Gestapo, the Secret Police and other hooligans were creatures of tinsel. And the events of this sombre century – the bombardments, blitzkriegs, putsches, purges — were, so far as he was concerned, so many ‘noises off'

‘And now,' he said, ‘we shall go. We shall go for a walk.'

O
n my way out, I thanked Marta for cooking supper. A wan smile passed across her face. Without getting off her stool, she inclined her torso stiffly from the waist.

It was a very warm and sultry night, and moths were whirling round the street lamps. In Old Town Square, crowds of young people had congregated at the foot of the Jan Hus Memorial. They seemed fresh and full of vigour: the boys in white open-necked shirts; the girls in old-fashioned cotton dresses.

The stars came out behind the spires of the Týn Church and, to peals of organ music, more people began to file through the arcades of the Divinity School, on their way from Mass. ‘Prague Spring' was almost a year away: yet I remember an atmosphere of optimism. I remember being taken aback when Utz turned on me, and bared his teeth.

‘I hate this city,' he said.

‘Hate it? How can you hate it? You said it was a beautiful city.'

‘I hate it. I hate it.'

‘Things will get better,' I said. ‘Things can only get better.'

‘You are wrong. Things will never get better.'

He shook my hand and gave a curt bow.

‘Goodnight, my young friend,' he said. ‘Remember what I said. I will leave you now. I will go to the brothel.'

T
hat winter I sent Utz a Christmas card and got a postcard in return – of the tomb-slab of Tycho Brahé — hoping that when I next returned to Prague I would call him.

During the months that followed, as the world watched the activities of Comrade Dubček, I tried to imagine Utz's reaction to the events, wondering if he still stuck to his guns: that things would never, ever get better.

As the summer wore on, despite noises in the Soviet press, it seemed less and less likely that Brezhnev would send in the tanks. But one night, as I drove into Paris, the Boulevard Saint-Germain was closed to traffic, and police with riot-shields were pushing back a surge of demonstrators.

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.

A
t 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:

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.

T
he 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 to 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: