Utz (11 page)

‘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.'

A
fter 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?'

‘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.

U
tz 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.

At the ceremony Marta was very shy, and very upset by the red flags in the Old Town Hall. ‘The colour of blood,' she shuddered, as they came out into the sunlight.

On the following Monday, the newlyweds, arm in arm, joined the shuffling queue of house-seekers, and presented their marriage certificate to the bureaucrat in charge. They put on a drooling show of affection. The eviction order was cancelled.

Marta gave up her own room, and brought her bag to No. 5 Široká Street.

I
cannot vouch for the authenticity of Utz's title ‘baron'. Andreas von Raabe, a friend of mine who lives in Munich, assures me that the Utzes of Krondorf did marry, from time to time, into the minor German nobility. He cannot be certain if they were ever ennobled themselves.

Nor, after my call on Dr Frankfurter in New York, do I believe that Utz's annual pilgrimage to the West was quite so ‘pure'. I must have been very naive to think the authorities would let him travel back and forth without a favour in return.

Dr Frankfurter's apartment, as I said, was jammed with Meissen and other German porcelain. It was clear that much of it had belonged to aristocratic families in Czechoslovakia and had been sold off, recently, by the State. The Czechs were always in need of hard currency to finance their various activities: espionage or subversion. I now suspect that the safe-deposit in the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva was an unofficial shop — with a Mr Utz in charge — through which confiscated works of art were sold.

But I
can
state, categorically, that Utz did have a moustache.

Without the moustache, he might have remained in my imagination another art-collector, of fussy habits and feminine inclinations, whose encounters with women were ambiguous.

With the moustache, he was a relentless lady-killer.

‘Of course he had a moustache!' Dr Frankfurter shook with smutty laughter. ‘The moustache was the clue to his personality!'

Utz had grown the moustache after his adolescent disappointments in Vienna, and had never looked back. He was not the ineffectual lover I had pictured in Vichy. His entire life had been a successful pursuit of voluminous operatic divas: though, since singers of high opera were too temperamental and too obsessed with their art, he tended to settle for the stars of operetta.

A succession of Merry Widows and Countess Mitzis passed through his bed. And if the usual sources of erotic arousal left him cold, he would be driven to frenzy by the sight of a lower larynx, as the singer threw back her head to hit a high note.

He was an ordinary little man. The secret of his attraction to the divas was his technique – you could call it a trick – of applying the stiff bristles of the moustache to the lady's throat so that, for her, the crescendo of love-making was as ecstatic as the final notes of an aria.

The part played by Marta in all this was a sad one.

She had adored Utz with a hopeless and blinkered passion from the moment he beckoned her into his automobile. Yet realising, with a certain peasant canniness, that to hope would drive her mad, she accepted her position. If she did not enjoy his body in this world, she would, with faith, enjoy his soul in the next.

She prayed and prayed. She went tirelessly to Mass. In the Church of Our Lady Victorious she would weep in front of the Prague Baby Jesus: a greedy infant who appropriated pious ladies' necklaces and had his costume changed, weekly, by nuns.

Once, in an outburst of frustrated maternal passion, she offered to help the nuns undress Him, and was rudely rebuffed.

She dared not confess to Him the extent of her ambitions. She begged forgiveness for her husband's infidelities, and for her role in turning the bedroom of No. 5 Široká Street into ‘something like a Polish bordel'.

She had never made love to a man – except for one brutal encounter behind a haystack. Yet she acquired a professional's skill in preparing the bedroom for ladies too proud, or too ashamed, to bring an overnight bag.

She applied her entrepreneurial talents on the black market to acquire scented soap, toilet water, talcum-powder, face-powder, towels, flannels and the assortment of pink crêpe-de-chine négligés that unaccountably went missing from the laundry of diplomatic wives.

Sometimes, Utz's visitor found one of these luxuries too tempting to resist, and would stuff it into her reticule. Marta found it expedient to leave an immediate bait on the bed-table – a lipstick or a pair of nylons — and so preserved her more valuable stocks.

She would cook the dinner and wash the dishes. Then, as Utz began his routine with the Commedia figures and the music of ‘Ariadne auf Naxos', she would slip out into the night.

Some nights she spent on the floor of her friend Suzana: a woman who kept a vegetable stall on Havelská Street. There were worse nights at the Central Railway Station, her heart in shreds, crossing herself at the thought of thrashing limbs and pink satin.