Utz (12 page)

Since the queue of ladies became more, not less, pressing over the years, the number of nights she had to sleep out increased. There was never a hint of reproach on her part. Nor, on his, the least acknowledgement that she had ever been inconvenienced.

She believed that, by marrying her, he had done her all the honour in the world. My impression is that, in her mind, and perhaps even in his, she played the part of a consort who is obliged to witness, with amused condescension, a succession of hysterical mistresses.

After moving into the apartment, she had slept under a quilt on the narrow Mies van der Rohe daybed. But one night, while reliving in a nightmare the horrors of Utz's arrest by the Gestapo, she landed on the floor with a reverberative wallop that set the porcelains clattering on the shelves.

Thereafter, she preferred a kapok-filled camping-mattress that could be rolled out in the hallway: any night intruder would have to tread on her.

I
uncovered evidence of Marta's unwavering feud with the tenant of the flat below.

Ada Krasová, in the course of a tumultuous affair with Utz, had used her opera singer's privileges to import a bale of pink satin from Italy, and had decorated his bedroom in the taste of a demimondaine.

She then committed the solecism of installing herself on the floor below and, seriously believing she could outwit Marta, had pinched a bottle of Chanel No. 5. Marta countered this act of kleptomania with a bald statement, ‘I shall not be cooking for her.' The lady was never invited again: and when I found her, thirty years later, she was still stewing in rancorous recrimination, among her souvenirs.

I don't know the exact date: but sometime in the mid-Sixties, at a performance of ‘Don Carlos', Utz trained his opera glasses on the throat of a singer far younger than his usual prey: a substantial girl with an outstanding tonal range who, as Queen of Spain, had to conceal her golden, hawser-like plait within the folds of a black mantilla.

Next day, on his habitual visit to the opera café, Utz summoned up the courage to address her – and recoiled from her stinging reply: ‘Get away, you silly old fool!'

It was a lowering winter day. He had an attack of sinusitis and pink-eye. He glanced into the mirror of a shop-front and, in a moment of extreme disillusion, was forced to revise his image of himself as the eternal lover.

What passed between him and Marta, one can only guess. But, from that day on, she quit the campingmattress and moved into the bed.

The pink art-silk dressing-gown was the emblem of her victory.

His embittered tone, as we parted in the Old Town Square, was perhaps conditioned by the fact that he and his wife had swapped roles. She was too tactful to make a public show, but was certainly the mistress of the household. Henceforth, if he wanted to go philandering, he would have to philander elsewhere.

She then made the victory complete.

She had been married at an atheistic – not to say pagan – ceremony, and had always felt cheated of her rights. In her mumbled conversations with the Infant of Prague, she confessed to having committed a cardinal sin: sleeping with a man to whom she was unmarried in the sight of God.

One day in April, as she and Utz were springcleaning some boxes stored on top of the wardrobe, she opened one containing the white lace veil that had been worn by brides of the Utzes since the eighteenth century.

She laid it out on the pink satin coverlet. She looked at him pointedly. He returned her glance.

U
tz and Marta were married in the Church of Saint Nikolaus on an incandescent afternoon of plum blossom and hazy blue skies in the ‘Prague Spring' of 1968.

She wore a white suit, with minor sweatstains under the arm-pits, and carried a bouquet of white lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley. The veil, pinned over her head, did not look incongruous. A lock of grey hair fell aslant across her brow.

To the Wedding March from ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream', the priest, in ruffles and a wig, led the procession up the aisle.

They passed the inevitable cleaning woman who removed herself and her bucket into a pew, and waved them on gaily with her mop handle. They passed the pulpit, which was the colour of raspberry ice-cream, and arrived in front of the altar where a mitred statue of St Cyril was lancing a pagan with the butt of his crozier.

The onlookers, their curiosity piqued by the disparate sizes of the bride and groom, were taken aback by the elderly couple who turned defiantly to face them: as well as by the smudge of vermilion lipstick that Marta — using lipstick for the first time — had planted on her husband's temple, being too tall to reach his lips at the moment of the bridal kiss.

The organ poured forth Sigmund Romberg's ‘When I'm calling you . . .' and as the pair came out into the sunlight, the crowd assembled on the steps broke into a round of hand-clapping.

Another wedding-party was waiting to go in. The young men wore sprigs of myrtle in their lapels. Marta's sharp eye registered that the girl was pregnant. She cringed at the applause, fearing, perhaps, that they were making fun of her. But the bridegroom, a friendly fine-boned boy, bade the Utzes to join them inside for the service, and afterwards at the Hotel Bristol.

A reception for one couple of newlyweds doubled into a reception for two. The revellers, drunk on tokay, made a number of mocking toasts to the bear at the head of the table.

I
am now in a position to add to my account of Utz's funeral.

Between the moment of death and the appearance of the undertaker, Marta had obliterated the porcelain shelves with draperies of black material. She called Orlík from the Museum, and the two sat vigil until the coffin was taken away.

Ada Krasová, meanwhile, conducted her own dirge on the floor below. Women from all over Prague, from Brno, from Bratislava; women who had detested each other, on the operatic stage, and as rivals for Utz's affection, were now united in their hatred of Marta for thwarting them of their final glimpse of the moustache.

They screamed. They hissed. They banged on the door. She was deaf to their entreaties.

On the eve of the entombment, she posted Orlík to guard her exit and entrance, and held a conference on the stairwell in which she informed the grieving women of the arrangements for the next day.

With inspired malice, she told them the service would be held in the Church of Saint Jakob instead of Saint Sigismund; the burial at the Vyšehrad Cemetery instead of the Vinohrady; and that breakfast at the Hotel Bristol – ‘to which my beloved husband bade you all attend' – would begin at 9.45 a.m. instead of 9.15.

As a result there were two more hired Tatra limousines shuttling back and forth across Prague in the early hours of that bitter morning: one containing a group of retired operatic divas, the other crammed with officials from the Rudolfine Museum.

These two parties coincided at the entrance to the hotel dining-room at the moment when the widow Utz – having raised her tokay glass ‘To the Bear! To the Bear!' – was making her remorseless exit.

Taking her leatherette bag into the ladies' lavatory, she changed out of black into a suit of brown wool jersey. She took a taxi to the Central Station, a train to Ceské Budejovice, and went to stay with her sister who still lived in their native village.

W
hen reconstructing any story, the wilder the chase the more likely it is to yield results.

Acting on a tip from Ada Krasová, who made a number of veiled allusions to the hammering that used to sound from Utz's apartment, I stationed myself on the corner of Široká and Maislova Streets, between one and two of a drizzly Saturday morning, to await the emptying of the dustbins.

In Prague, at least in the older quarters, many citizens have an obsessional relationship with garbage. An apartment building such as Nos 5 and 6 Široká Street — built for prosperous bourgeois before the Great War — retains, in the foyer, the original red and yellow marble facings. But where, in the old days, there might have stood a console with a vase of artificial flowers, now, in these less fastidious times, the visitor is greeted by a platoon of grey, galvanised dustbins, of standard size, and with identical articulated lids.

The garbage trucks of Prague are painted a vivid orange. They have been in service for about fifteen years. As a warning to motorists, they are mounted with revolving orange lights that flash their beams against the surrounding architecture. These lights, and the noise of the vehicles' crushing machinery, are the curse of light sleepers but a source of wonder to insomniacs, who will rise from their beds to watch the scene in the street below.

The dustmen wear orange overalls, with leather aprons to protect them as they roll the bins into the street.

I watched a young man remove the refuse of the kosher restaurant in the Jewish Town Hall before moving on to the Golem Restaurant where, earlier in the day, I had sent back a ‘Kalbsfilet jüdischer Art' which was garnished with a slice of ham.

He was an energetic young man with laughing eyes and a mop of curly hair. He performed his task with an air of cheerful bravado. The light lit his face into an orange mask.

His companion was a big black Doberman pinscher, his snout in a basketwork muzzle, who either sat on the passenger seat, or hurtled round the block chasing cats, or lovingly rested his forepaws on his master's shoulders.

Turning into Široká Street, the young man manoeuvred the truck arse-first against the kerb, on the opposite side to the Pinkas Synagogue. Then, having rolled out the dustbins from Nos 4, 5 and 6, he stationed them in groups on the sidewalk.

An orange arm shot forth from the truck; clamped its claws around the lip of the bin; lifted it upside down into the air; and, with a double
chu-unk!
. . .
chu-unk!
. . . jettisoned the contents into the vehicle's belly.

The bin returned to earth with a bang, while from inside the truck came the noise of gnashing, crushing, churning, compressing and the shriek of metal teeth.

The Doberman tried to lick my face but was unable to slide its tongue through the muzzle. The dustman was friendly to the man who had befriended his dog and, to my surprise, spoke English.

What was I doing here?

‘I'm a writer,' I said.

‘So am I,' he said.

Many of his colleagues were writers, or poets or out-of-work actors. They met on Saturdays to drink in a village near the dump. He gave directions how to get there.

‘Ask for Ludvík,' he said.

T
he village was an oasis of orchards and cottage gardens in a waste of industrial pollution. In a garden of roses and hollyhocks, Ludvík was hosing down his truck.

He took me to the bar where his friends, in overalls of orange and blue, were knocking back tankards of Pilsen beer. Some read newspapers, some played chess. In a quiet corner two men were playing backgammon. They finished, and turned to greet us.

One of the men was the Catholic philosopher, Miroslav Žítek, who, as I knew from émigré publications, was the author of an essay on the self-destructive nature of Force. He was a broadshouldered man with greying sideburns and an open, pink face. He was smoking a meerschaum pipe. He told me how, in Socialist Czechoslovakia, everyone over the age of sixty had the right to a State pension, providing he had put in the required years of work. He and his friends preferred not to embroil themselves in whitecollar squabbles: manual labour was better for the mind.

Žítek had worked as a gardener, street-sweeper and garbage-collector but, with two years to sixty, he found that kind of work exhausting, and had got a new job. He was a bike-boy.

The job was to take computer-software across Prague, from one computer-centre to another. The software fitted into one of his saddlebags, his philosophical treatise into the other. Whenever he made a delivery, the manager of the centre would set aside a room for him to work in. He would work for three hours. Sometimes, at the end of the day, he read a chapter to an audience of workers.

He had some strong things to say about certain Czech writers in exile who, assuming for themselves the mantle of Bohemian culture, neglected what was happening in Bohemia.

Žítek's backgammon-partner was a man with tremendous biceps and a grinning face latticed with scars. His name was Košík. He had gone to America after '68, to Elizabeth, New Jersey, but had returned because the beer was undrinkable.

It was he who, in 1973 – the year of Utz's first stroke – had done the garbage round in the Old Jewish Quarter. He would thus have emptied Utz's dustbins.

I now come to the most difficult part of my story. Once I took it into my head that the Utz Collection could have vanished down the maw of a garbage truck, my temptation was to twist every scrap of evidence in that direction.

Košík answered my questions with amused good humour. But I am doubtful, in retrospect, whether his answers were genuine, or the answers I wanted to hear. I cannot place much reliance on the image he spun for me: that, when clearing the bins of No. 5 Široká Street, he sometimes saw a shadowy figure flattening himself or herself against the back wall of the entrance lobby. One night, he said, a pair of figures appeared at the window of the top floor apartment — and waved.

I felt I was on firmer ground with Košík's second story: here, at least, there was a measure of agreement among his drinking companions.

They agreed that ten or twelve years ago – more maybe – a taxi used to bring an elderly couple to the village for a Sunday afternoon stroll. The man was shorter than the woman, shuffled his feet, and had to be supported on her arm. They would walk along the lane, as far as the wire fence surrounding the dump, and then walk back to the taxi.