Utz (6 page)

She sang strange, incoherent songs and was thought to be simple: especially when she fell in love with a gander. Children in peasant Europe believed the tales they were told: of werewolves, of stars that were ducks in flight, or the gander who turned into a shining prince.

Marta's gander was a magnificent snow-white bird: the object of terror to foxes, children and dogs. She had reared him as a gosling; and whenever she approached, he would let fly a low contented burble and sidle his neck around her thighs. Some mornings, at first light when no one was about, she would swim with her lover in the lake, and allow him to nibble her long fair hair.

One morning, sometime in the late Thirties, as Utz was driving his Steyr coupé from the castle to catch the early train to Prague, he caught sight of a girl in dripping clothes being hounded down the street by a mob of villagers. He braked the car, and asked her to sit beside him.

‘Come with me,' he said kindly.

She cringed, but obeyed. He drove her back to the castle.

A new life opened up for her, in domestic service. She followed her master's movements with an adoring gaze: frequently he had to prevent her from kissing his hand. Four years later, when he had put her in charge of the household, his other retainers, puzzled by the habits of this solitary bachelor, spread rumours that she shared his bed.

The truth was that, in a world of shifting allegiances – and since the death of his grandmother's faithful major-domo – she was the only person he could trust, and, at the same time, use. Only she knew the hay-loft where the Hebrew scholar Dr Kraus – and his Talmuds — was in hiding: she would risk her life to fetch him food. Only she had the key to the cellar where, throughout the War, the porcelains were stored.

Later, in the months after the Communist takeover, when the peasants, still bemused by propaganda, believed that the new ideology allowed them to divide the landlord's property, it was she who stood guard against them. Utz was free to leave the castle with his treasures.

In Prague, she slept in a leaky attic room a few doors down Široká Street. When interrogated about the terms of her employment, she bridled. She was not Mr Utz's employee. She looked after him merely as a friend.

He, by inviting her to share his table, affirmed that the friendship was shared.

Over dinner, he explained the reason for his journey. She dropped her knife and fork, and gasped, ‘You're not ill, I hope.'

He calmed her fears, but gave no hint that he might never come back. She should sleep, meanwhile, in the apartment — in his bed if she wished it — and keep the door firmly locked. His friend, Dr Orlík, would look in from time to time, in case there was anything she needed.

The wine went to her head. She became a little flushed. She talked a little too much. For her, it was an evening of perfect happiness.

At breakfast, she came back to make coffee. She helped Utz with his suitcase to the taxi. Then she climbed upstairs, and listened to the beating of the rain.

T
he customs men were expecting him at the frontier.

They frisked him, removed the small change from his pockets and, as experts in the art of irritation, appropriated Marta's picnic. Then, finding nothing in his luggage that could be classed as a work of art, they took his copy of ‘The Magic Mountain' and a pair of tortoiseshell hairbrushes.

‘I suppose,' he muttered as the green caps moved along the corridor, ‘they need those for the Museum also.'

After Nuremberg, the rainclouds lifted and the sun came out. He had nothing now to read and so stared from the window at the telegraph wires, the tarred wood gables of the farmhouses, the orchards, the cows in fields of buttercups, and parties of blond-haired children who clung to the barriers of level-crossings and waved their satchels.

The signal-boxes, he noticed, were pitted with bullet-holes. Across the compartment sat a young married couple.

The girl was turning the leaves of an album of wedding-photos. She was pregnant. She wore a grey smock trimmed with lace. Her bluish legs were unshaven, and her dyed hair dark at the roots.

The boy, Utz was glad to see, was disgusted by her. He looked very ill-at-ease in his American leather flying-jacket, and shuddered whenever she touched him. He was a swarthy, skinny boy with pouting lips and a head of black curls. His nails were stained with nicotine, and he chain-smoked desperately. Was he an Arab, or something? Or a gipsy? Or Italian? Italian, Utz decided, after hearing him speak. She must have had money, and he had been starving. But what a price to pay!

She began to unpack her hamper and Utz began to have second thoughts. He was ravenous. Had he, perhaps, misjudged her? Perhaps she would offer him a share?

He prepared a grateful smile for when the time came. Then, like a dog at the master's table, he watched her swallow a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a schnitzel, a ham sandwich, half a cold chicken and some rounds of garlic sausage. She swilled these down with a bottle of beer, smacked her lips and continued, absent-mindedly, to stuff slices of pumpernickel between them.

The boy hardly touched his food.

Utz could stand the strain no longer. He had come to a decision. He would ask. He would beg. He opened his mouth to say ‘Please' — at which the young man tore off a chicken leg and was in the act of handing it across when the girl, shouting ‘No! No! No!', slapped him back, and went on peeling an orange.

The smell of orange rind filled the compartment. Ach! What wouldn't he give for an orange! Even a segment of orange! The oranges one got in Prague, scavenged or stolen from one or other of the embassies, were usually shrivelled and tasteless. But this orange dripped its juice over the monster's fingers.

Utz leaned his head against the leathercloth headrest and, closing his eyes, remembered Augustus's aphorism: ‘The craving for porcelain is like a craving for oranges.'

The girl called for a napkin, and wiped her fingers. A second orange went the way of the first: then a slice of cheese, a slice of Linzetorte, a Nusstorte, a plum cake. Then she poured herself a coffee from a thermos flask.

She belched. She pestered her husband for a show of affection. He whispered in her ear. Again, Utz summoned an ingratiating smile. But, instead of offering him the last ham sandwich, she fixed him with a glutted stare and, lurching to her feet, chucked it from the window.

Utz watched this little drama draw to its inevitable close and mumbled, in German, loud enough for her to hear:

‘It could never have happened in Czechoslovakia.'

A
t Geneva next morning the man from the bank was waiting on the platform: a rendezvous arranged by the Swiss ambassador in Prague, who, in those days, was ‘everyone's friend'.

Utz followed the man's preposterous Tyrolean hat to the lavatory, where he took delivery of a thick manilla envelope containing a wad of Swiss francs, and facsimiles of his share certificates.

He had two hours to kill before the train left for Lyon – and Vichy. He couldn't think of anywhere else to go. He checked his bag at the consigne, and went for breakfast at a café opposite the station. But the coffee was weak, the croissants stale, and the cherry jam tasted of chemical preservative.

He glanced at the other tables. The room was crowded with businessmen on their way to work, burying their faces in the financial columns of the newspapers.

‘No,' he told himself. ‘I am not enjoying this.'

A
t Vichy the hotel had been redecorated, as if to .wipe away the stain of having harboured the Laval administration in its rooms. Utz's own room was furnished with reproduction Louis Seize furniture, painted grey. The carpet was blue, and the walls were baby blue with white trim: the décor of the nursery, of the fresh start. On a commode stood a chipped plaster bust of Marie Antoinette, and there were modern engravings: of other bird-brained eighteenth-century ladies.

‘No, no,' Utz repeated. ‘I am certainly not enjoying this. The French have lost their taste.'

Nor did he enjoy his meetings with Dr Forestier, a man with papery skin and a mouth full of snobbish indiscretions, who had his consulting room in a Gothic house shrouded by paulownias. Nor the immense cream stucco buildings — ‘style pâtissier 1900' — stretched out along the Boulevard des États-Unis where the Gestapo had had its headquarters. Nor the mud baths, the frictions, the facials, the pressureshowers. Nor — judging from the drawn, dyspeptic faces of other sufferers — were these celebrated waters in the least beneficial to the health.

He could take no pleasure from the company of the small, aged people – ‘ex-colons' whose digestion had been wrecked in Africa or Indo-China – clinging to their raffia-covered ‘gobelets de cure' and taking slow, careful steps, out of the rain, under the covered walkway that runs beside the Rue du Pare.

He did not appreciate the gerontophile glint of the masseur — ‘a very disturbed young man!' — and hoped that perhaps he was too young. Nor did he care for the ladies of the Grand Établissement Thermal: disciplinarian ladies in white coats and gloves who introduced him to the use of ‘les instruments de torture' – remedial machines that Kafka
would
have appreciated – so that he found himself being strapped to a saddle and pummelled, gently but firmly in the intestines, with a pair of leather boxing-gloves.

He winced at the sound of English voices. He averted his eyes from the ‘mutilés de guerre': men missing an arm or both legs but playing poker, none the less, on white-painted chairs with perforated seats like cullenders. One evening, after dinner, he had to flee from a lady in tourmaline velvet who spoke, in German, of the Aga Khan.

He became abnormally sensitive to people's stares, especially those of solitary men, who, he imagined, were tailing him.

Who, for example, was that youth in the ill-fitting suit? Hadn't he seen him in Prague? Hanging around the foyer of the Hotel Alkron? No. He had not. The youth was a salesman of sanitary equipment.

Utz pottered round the antique shops and found nothing of interest: a few soapstone Buddhas and dubious Empire clocks. A woman tried to sell him Egyptian amulets, and a pack of tarot cards. At a shop that sold lace, he thought of buying a pinafore to take home to Marta.

‘But I won't be going home,' he reflected dismally. ‘And anyway they'd steal it at the customs.'

He went to the races, and was bored. He was bored at a concert where they played the ‘Suite from Finlandia'. He was desperately bored by the ‘Spectacle' at the Grand Théâtre du Casino, which began with ‘Les Plus Belles Girls de Paris' – all of them English! – and continued with ‘Les Hommes en Crystal' – who were a bunch of fairies smeared with silver paint!

In the interval, he reflected on the absurdity of his position. Here he was, another middle-aged, Middle European refugee adrift in an unfriendly world! And worse, the most useless of refugees, an aesthete!

After the interval, he had a change of mood.

The curtain rose on Lucienne Boyer, ‘La Dame en Bleu': a compact and rounded woman, approaching fifty yet apparently ageless and wearing a dress of dark blue satin, and a blue rose at the apex of her décolleté. She sang number after number at the microphone. Utz's pupils dilated as he gazed, through opera glasses, at her quivering throat. And when she sang ‘Parlez-moi d'amour ', he got to his feet and shouted ‘Bravo! Bravo! Encore!' — and she gave an encore, four of them. And afterwards, after he had watched her leave the theatre with a younger man, he walked home to the Pavilion Sévigné, over cobbled streets slippery with leaves after a hailstorm, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight, swaying slightly and humming the refrain, ‘Je vous aime . . . Je vous aime . . .'

U
tz had an idea, derived from Russian novels or his parents' love affair at Marienbad, that a spa-town was a place where the unexpected invariably happened.

Two lonely people, brought thither by the accidents of ill-health or unhappiness, would cross paths on their afternoon walk. Their eyes would meet over a bed of municipal marigolds. Drawn by the natural attraction of opposites, they would sit on the same cast-iron seat, and exchange the first stilted sentences. (‘Do you come to Vichy often?' ‘No. It's my first visit.' ‘And mine!') A rapturous evening would end in one or other of their rooms. Either the affair would end in a sad farewell (‘No, my dearest, I beg you. Don't come to the station'). Or, when parting seemed inevitable, they would take the drastic decision that would bind them for the rest of their lives.

Utz had come to Vichy with the romantic notion: that, if the decision had to be taken, he would take it.

He hoped . . . he was sure to find among this crowd of solitaries a tender, middle-aged, preferably vulnerable woman who would love him, not for his looks . . . That, alas, was not possible! . . . He had always been ugly, but he did have other qualities.

There had been occasions in the past when a woman had set her sights on him. On each occasion, when intimacy seemed possible, she had uttered the fatal words, ‘Oh, you must see his treasures!' – and a cold draught had killed his affection.

No. Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.

But where was she, this elusive female who would fall into his arms? ‘Fall' — that was the operative word! Fall, without his having to pursue her. He was tired of pursuing precious objects.

Was she the steel-haired American, widowed or divorced he decided, obviously at Vichy for beauty treatment? Intelligent, of course, but not sympathetic. He mistrusted the acerbic tone with which she ordered her Manhattans from the barman.

Or the soft-voiced creature, Parisian without a doubt, with golden hair and a melting mouth? He saw her first among the morning crowd at the Source des Célestins. moving along the white trellis in a dress of white lace and a hat composed of layers of stiffened chiffon. She had been delicious and would soon be plump. No. Not her. She spent hours in idle chatter in the phone-booth, and came away with a lost look, laughing.