Utz (3 page)

These measures gave him time: sufficient at least to evacuate the porcelains, without loss or breakage, before they were requisitioned by the canaille.

His next move was to make a show of taking up Hebrew studies under the guidance of Dr Kraus: these were the years when pictures of Marx and Lenin used to hang in Israeli kibbutzes. He got a poorly paid job, as a cataloguer in the National Library. He installed himself in an inconspicuous flat in Židovské Město: its previous inhabitant having vanished in the Heydrichiada.

Twice a week he went loyally to watch a Soviet film.

When his friend Dr Orlík suggested they both flee to the West, Utz pointed to the ranks of Meissen figurines, six deep on the shelves, and said, ‘I cannot leave them.'

‘H
ow did he get away with it?'

‘With what?'

‘The porcelain. How did he hang on to it?'

‘He did a deal.'

My friend the historian gave me an outline of the facts as he knew them. It seems that the Communist authorities — ever ready to assume a veneer of legality – had allowed Utz to keep the collection providing every piece was photographed and numbered. It was also agreed – although never put in writing – that, after his death, the State Museums would get the lot.

Besides, Marxist-Leninism had never got to grips with the concept of the private collection. Trotsky, around the time of the Third International, had made a few offhand comments on the subject. But no one had ever decided if the ownership of a work of art damned its owner in the eyes of the Proletariat. Was the collector a class-enemy? If so, how?

The Revolution, of course, postulated the abolition of private property without ever defining the tenuous borderline between property (which was harmful to society) and household goods (which were not). A painting by a great master might rank as a national treasure, and be liable for confiscation — and there were families in Prague who kept their Picassos and Matisses rolled up between the floor joists. But porcelain? Porcelain could also be classed as crockery. So, providing it wasn't smuggled from the country, it was, in theory, valueless. To start confiscating ceramic statuettes could turn into an administrative nightmare:

‘Imagine trying to confiscate an infinite quantity of plaster-of-Paris Lenins . . .'

H
is face was immediately forgettable. It was a round face, waxy in texture, without a hint of the passions beneath its surface, set with narrow eyes behind steel-framed spectacles: a face so featureless it gave the impression of not being there. Did he have a moustache? I forget. Add a moustache, subtract a moustache: nothing would alter his utterly nondescript appearance. Supposing, then, we add a moustache? A precise, bristly moustache to go with the precise, toy-soldierish gestures that were the only evidence of his Teuton ancestry? He had combed his hair in greasy snakes across his scalp. He wore a suit of striped grey worsted slightly frayed at the cuffs, and had doused himself with Knize Ten cologne.

On reflection, I think I'd better withdraw the moustache. To add a moustache might so overwhelm the face that nothing would linger in the memory but the spectacles and a moustache – with a few drops of paprika-coloured fish-soup adhering to it – across our table at the Restaurant Pstruh.

‘Pstruh' is Czech for ‘trout' — and trout there were! The cadences of the ‘Trout' Quintet flowed methodically through hidden speakers and shoals of trout – pink, freckled, their undersides shimmering in the neon – swam this way and that way in an aquarium which occupied most of one wall.

‘You will eat trout,' said Utz.

I had called him on the day of my arrival, but at first he seemed reluctant to see me:

‘Ja! Ja! I know it. But it will be difficult . . .'

 

On the advice of my friend, I had brought from London some packets of his favourite Earl Grey tea. I mentioned these. He relented and asked me to luncheon: on the Thursday, the day before I was due to leave – not, as I had hoped, at his flat, but in a restaurant.

The restaurant, a relic of the Thirties in an arcade off Wenceslas Square, had a machine-age decor of plate-glass, chromium and leather. A model galleon, with sails of billowing parchment, hung from the ceiling. One wondered, glancing at the photo of Comrade Novotný, how a man with so disagreeable a mouth would consent to being photographed at all. The head-waiter, sweltering in the July heat, offered each of us a menu that resembled a mediaeval missal.

We were expecting the arrival of Utz's friend, Dr Orlík, with whom he had lunched here on Thursdays since 1946.

‘Orlík', he told me, ‘is an illustrious scientist from our National Museum. He is a palaeontologue. His speciality is the mammoth, but he is also experienced in flies. You will enjoy him. He is full of jokes and charm.'

We did not have long to wait before a gaunt, bearded figure in a shiny double-breasted suit pushed its way through the revolving doors. Orlík removed his beret, revealing a mass of wiry salt-and-pepper hair, and sat down. His hand – rather a crustacean claw than a hand – gave mine a painful nip and moved on to attack the pretzels. His forehead was scoured with deep furrows. I stared with amazement at the see-saw motion of his jaw.

‘Ah! Ha!' he leered at me. ‘English, he? Englishman! Yes. YES! Tell me, is Professor Horsefield still living?'

‘Who's Horsefield?' I asked.

‘He wrote kind words about my article in the “Journal of Animal Psychology”.'

‘When was that?'

‘1935,' he said. ‘Maybe ‘36.'

‘I've never heard of Horsefield.'

‘A pity,' said Orlík. ‘He was an illustrious scientist.'

He paused to crunch the remaining pretzel. His green eyes glinted with playful malice.

‘Normally,' he continued, ‘I do not have high regard for your compatriots. You betrayed us at München . . . You betrayed us at Yalta . . .'

Utz, alarmed by this dangerous turn to the conversation, interrupted and said, solemnly, ‘I cannot believe that animals have souls.'

‘How can you say that?' Orlík snapped.

‘I say it.'

‘I know you say it. I know not how you can say it.'

‘I will order,' said Utz, who waved his napkin, like a flag of truce, at the head-waiter. ‘I will order trout. “Au bleu”, isn't it?'

‘Blau,' Orlík bantered.

‘Blau yourself.'

Orlík tugged at my sleeve: ‘My friend Mr Utz here believes that the trout, when it is immersed in boiling water, does not feel more than a tickling. That is not my opinion.'

‘There are no trout,' said the head-waiter.

‘What can you mean, no trout?' said Utz. ‘There are trout. Many trout.'

‘There is no net.'

‘What can you mean, no net? Last week there was a net.'

‘Is broken.'

‘Broken, I do not believe.'

The head-waiter put a finger to his lips, and whispered, ‘These trout are reserved.'

‘For them?'

‘Them,' he nodded.

Four fat men were eating trout at a nearby table.

‘Very well,' said Utz. ‘I will eat eels. You also will eat eels?'

‘I will,' I said.

‘There are no eels,' said the waiter.

‘No eels? This is bad. What have you?'

‘We have carp.'

‘Carp only?'

‘Carp.'

‘How shall you cook this carp?'

‘Many ways,' the waiter gestured to the menu. ‘Which way you like.'

The menu was multilingual: in Czech, Russian, German, French and English. But whoever had compiled the English page had mistaken the word ‘carp' for ‘crap'. Under the heading CRAP DISHES, the list contained ‘Crap soup with paprika', ‘Stuffed crap', ‘Crap cooked in beer', ‘Fried crap', ‘Crap balls', ‘Crap à la juive . . .'

‘In England,' I said, ‘this fish is called “carp”. “Crap” has a different meaning.'

‘Oh?' said Dr Orlík. ‘What meaning?'

‘Faeces,' I said. ‘Shit.'

I regretted saying this because Utz looked exceedingly embarrassed. The narrow eyes blinked, as if he hoped he hadn't heard correctly. Orlík's wheezy carapace shook with laughter.

‘Ha! Ha!' he jeered. ‘Crap à la juive . . . My friend Mr Utz will eat Crap à la juive . . . !'

I was afraid Utz was going to leave, but he rose above his discomfiture and ordered soup and the ‘Carpe meunière'. I took the line of least resistance and ordered the same. Orlík clamoured in his loud and crackly voice, ‘No. No. I will eat “Crap à la juive” . . . !'

‘And to begin?' asked the waiter.

‘Nothing,' said Orlík. ‘Only the crap!'

I tried to swing the conversation to Utz's collection of porcelain. His reaction was to swivel his neck inside his collar and say, blankly, ‘Dr Orlík is also a collector. But he is a collector of flies.'

‘Flies?'

‘Flies,' assented Orlík.

I began to form a mental picture of his lodgings: the unmade bed and unemptied ash-trays; the avalanche of yellowing periodicals; the microscope; the killingjars and, lining the walls, glass-fronted cases containing flies from every corner of the globe, each specimen pierced with a pin. I mentioned some beautiful dragonflies I had seen in Brazil.

‘Dragonflies?' Orlík frowned. ‘I have not interest. I have only interest for Musca domestica.'

‘The common house-fly?'

‘That is what it is.'

‘Answer me,' Utz interrupted again. ‘On which day did God create the fly? Day Five? Or Day Six?'

‘How many times will I tell you?' Orlík clamoured. ‘We have one hundred ninety million years of flies. But you will always speak of days!'

‘Hard words,' said Utz, philosophically.

A fly had landed on the tablecloth and was sopping up some soup that the waiter had let fall from the ladle. With a flick of the wrist Orlík upturned a glass tumbler, and trapped the insect beneath it. He slid the glass to the edge of the table and transferred the fly to the killing-jar he took from his pocket. There was an angry buzzing, then silence.

He flourished a magnifying glass and scrutinised the victim.

‘Interesting example,' he said. ‘Hatched, I would say, in the kitchen here. I will ask . . .'

‘You will not ask,' said Utz.

‘I will. I will ask.'

‘You will not.'

‘And what', I asked, ‘brought you and the house-fly together?'

Expelling carp bones through his beard, Orlík described how he had devoted thirty years to studying certain aspects of the woolly mammoth: a labour which had taken him to the tundras of Siberia where mammoths are occasionally found deep-frozen in permafrost. The fruit of these researches – though he was usually too modest to mention it – had culminated in his magisterial paper ‘The Mammoth and His Parasites'. But no sooner was it published than he felt the need to study some lowlier creature.

‘I chose', he said, ‘to study Musca domestica within the Prague Metropolitan area.'

Just as his friend Mr Utz could tell at a glance whether a piece of Meissen porcelain was made from the white clay of Colditz or the white clay of Erzgebirge, he, Orlík, having examined under a microscope the iridescent membrane of a fly's wing, claimed to know if the insect came from Malá Strana or Židovské Město or from one of the garbage dumps that now encircled the New Garden City.

He confessed to being enchanted by the vitality of the fly. It was fashionable among his fellow entomologists – especially the Party Members – to applaud the behaviour of the social insects: the ants, bees, wasps and other varieties of Hymenoptera which organised themselves into regimented communities.

‘But the fly', said Orlík, ‘is an anarchist.'

‘Sssh!' said Utz. ‘You will not say that word!'

‘What word?'

‘That word.'

‘Yes. Yes,' Orlík pitched his voice an octave higher. ‘I will say it. The fly is an anarchist. He is an individualist. He is a Don Juan.'

The four fat Party Members, at whom this outburst was directed, were far too busy to notice: they were ogling their second helping of trout whose flesh, at that moment, the waiter was easing off the bone and blue skin.

‘I am not from the People,' Orlík said. ‘I have noble blood.'

‘Oh?' said Utz. ‘Which nobility?'

I thought for a moment that lunch was going to end in a slanging match – until I realised that this was another of their well-rehearsed duets. There followed a discussion on the merits (or otherwise) of Kafka, whom Utz revered as a demiurge and Orlík dismissed as a fraud. It was right for his books to be abolished.

‘Banned, you mean?' I said. ‘Censored?'

‘I do not mean,' said Orlík. ‘I said abolished.'

‘Paf! Paf!' Utz flapped his hand. ‘What foolishness is this?'

Orlík's case against Kafka was the doubtful entomological status of the insect in the story ‘Metamorphosis'. Again, I thought we were in for trouble. Again, the brouhaha simmered down. We drank a cup of anaemic coffee. Orlík extracted from me my London address, scribbled it on a scrap of paper napkin, rolled it into a pellet, and put it in his pocket.

He intercepted the bill and waved it in Utz's face.

‘I will pay,' he announced.

‘You will not pay.'

‘I will. I must.'

‘You will not,' said Utz, who snatched at the paper Orlík held for him to snatch.

Orlík's eyelids dropped in acquiescence.