Utz Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Praise for Utz

  “Utz wonderfully depicts that sad, romantic city of Prague, the ham-handedness of East European politics, a small gallery of deftly drawn characters. Chatwin’s deepening portrait of Utz is cunningly achieved . . . . It is triumphant.”

  — The Washington Post

  “Bruce Chatwin has set a story as delicate as the skyline . . . . In this mordant and suggestive story, he masters the grace, the damp, the dilapidation and the ghostly comedy of the city that produced Kafka and The Good Soldier Schweik, The Golem and Don Giovanni, and the inflamed reasonableness of spring, 1968.”

  — Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

  “Combining specific and the quotidian . . . Chatwin’s Prague is a palpable place . . . . The modeling is deft, the color bright, and the miniature scale of the piece displays a decorative mantelpiece charm.”

  — The Boston Globe

  “In a style that is spare, precise, understated and transparent, he offers a clear but distanced view of a curious character and his world. It’s enhanced with shadows, rather than flashes, of humor — the Kafkaesque, European humor of resignation.”

  — The Christian Science Monitor

  “Written in his usual crisply graceful style, in which seemingly simple descriptive passages resonate like lines of haiku . . . an elegantly ironic narrative that can be read merely for the pleasure of its concise but vivid language, for the wit and style of its characterizations, even for the suspense of discovering just what has become of Utz’s fabulous collection.”

  — The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Utz, with all its tricks and ideas, is constantly interesting . . . . [Chatwin’s] prose is as precise and stylish as when he soared onto the literary scene with his nonfiction book In Patagonia in 1977.”

  — The Wall Street Journal

  “A marvelously elegant character study.”

  — The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  UTZ

  Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940, and was the author of In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz. The last three he considered works of fiction. His other books are What Am I Doing Here, Anatomy of Restlessness, and Far Journeys, a collection of his photographs which also includes selections from his travel notebooks. Chatwin died outside Nice, France, on January 17, 1989.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1988

  First published in the United States of America

  by Viking Penguin Inc. 1989

  Published in Penguin Books 1989

  Copyright © Bruce Chatwin, 1988

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-52283-7

  IBN .1576 5 (pbk.)

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Diana Phipps

  An hour before dawn on March 7th 1974, Kaspar Joachim Utz died of a second and long-expected stroke, in his apartment at No. 5 Široká Street, overlooking the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

  Three days later, at 7.45 a.m., his friend Dr Václav Orlík was standing outside the Church of St Sigismund, awaiting the arrival of the hearse and clutching seven of the ten pink carnations he had hoped to afford at the florist’s. He noted with approval the first signs of spring. In a garden across the street, jackdaws with twigs in their beaks were wheeling above the lindens, and now and then a minor avalanche would slide from the pantiled roof of a tenement.

  While Orlík waited, he was approached by a man with a curtain of grey hair that fell below the collar of his raincoat.

  ‘Do you play the organ?’ the man asked in a catarrhal voice.

  ‘I fear not,’ said Orlík.

  ‘Nor do I,’ the man said, and shuffled off down a side-street.

  At 7.57 a.m., the same man unbolted from inside the immense baroque doors of the Church. Without a nod to Orlík he then climbed into the organ loft and, seating himself amid its choir of giltwood and trumpeting angels, began to play a funeral march composed of the two sonorous chords he had learned the day before: from the organist who was too lazy to stir from bed at this hour and had found, in the janitor, a replacement.

  At 8 a.m., the hearse — a Tatra 603 — drew up outside the steps: in order to divert the People’s attention from retrograde Christian rituals, the authorities had decreed that all baptisms, weddings and funerals must be over by 8.30. Three of the pall-bearers got out, and helped each other open the rear door.

  Utz had planned his own funeral with meticulous care. A blanket of white carnations covered the oak coffin — although he had not foreseen the wreath of Bolshevik vulgarity that had been placed on top: red poinsettias, red gladioli, red satin ribbon and a frieze of shiny laurel leaves. A card offered condolences (to whom?) from the Director of the Rudolfine Museum and his staff.

  Orlík added his modest tribute.

  A second Tatra brought the three remaining pall-bearers. They had squeezed themselves into the front seat beside the chauffeur while, on the back seat, sat a solitary woman in black, her black veil awash with tears. Since none of the men showed any inclination to help her, she pushed the door open and, shaking with grief, almost fell onto the slushy cobbles.

  To relieve the pressure on her bunions the sides of her shoes were slit open.

  Recognising her as Utz’s faithful servant Marta, Orlík rushed to her assistance — and she, collapsing onto his shoulder, allowed him to escort her. When he attempted to carry her brown leatherette bag, she wrenched it from his grasp.

  The bearers — employees of a rubber factory who worked night-shift and doubled for the undertaker by day – had shouldered the coffin and were advancing up the main aisle: to music that reminded Orlík of the tramp of soldiers on parade.

  Halfway to the altar the procession met the cleaning woman, who, with soap, water and a scrubbingbrush, was scrubbing at the blazon of the Rožmberk family, inlaid into the floor in many-coloured marbles.

  The leading bearer asked the woman, most politely, to allow the coffin to pass. She scowled and went on scrubbing.

  The bearers had no alternative but to take a left turn between two pews, a right turn up the side aisle, and another right to pass the pulpit. Eventually, they arrived before the altar where a youngish priest, his surplice stained with sacramental wine, was anxiously biting his fingernails.

  T
hey set down the coffin with a show of reverence. Then, attracted by the smell of hot bread from a bakery along the street, they strolled off to get breakfast leaving Orlík and the faithful Marta as the only mourners.

  The priest mumbled the service at the speed of a patter number and, from time to time, lifted his eyes towards a fresco of the Heavenly Heights. After commending the dead man’s soul, they had to wait at least ten minutes before the bearers condescended to return, at 8.26.

  At the cemetery, from which the snow had almost melted, the priest, though wrapped in a thick serge overcoat, began to suffer from a fit of shivers. The coffin had hardly been lowered into the earth when he began to shove the moaning Marta, by the shoulderblades, towards the waiting limousine. He declined Orlík’s invitation to breakfast at the Hotel Bristol. At the corner of Jungmannova Street he shouted for the chauffeur to stop, and jumped out slamming the door.

  It was Utz who had arranged, and paid for, this valedictory breakfast. An acrid smell of disinfectant flowed through the dining-room. Chairs were piled on tables, and more cleaning women were swabbing up the mess from a banquet held the previous evening, in honour of East German and Soviet computer experts. In the far left corner, a table covered in white damask was set for twenty people, with a fluted tokay glass at each place.

  Utz had miscalculated. He had counted on at least a handful of his more venal cousins turning up, in case there was anything to be had. He had counted, too, on a delegation from the Museum: if only to arrange the transfer of his porcelains into their grasping hands.

  As it was, Marta and Orlík sat alone, side by side, ordering smoked ham, cheese pancakes and wine from the slovenly waiter.

  At the far end of the table stood a huge stuffed bear, reared on its hind-legs, mouth agape, forepaws outstretched — placed there by some humorous person to remind the clientele of their country’s fraternal protector. On its plinth, a brass plaque announced that it had been shot by a Bohemian baron, not in the Tatras or Carpathians, but in the Yukon in 1926. The bear was a grizzly.

  After a glass or two of tokay, Marta had apparently given up grieving for her dead employer. After four glasses, she twisted her mouth into a mocking grin and shouted at the top of her voice: ‘To the Bear! . . . To the Bear!’

  In the summer of 1967 — a year before the Soviet tanks overran Czechoslovakia — I went to Prague for a week of historical research. The editor of a magazine, knowing of my interest in the Northern Renaissance, had commissioned me to write an article on the Emperor Rudolf II’s passion for collecting exotica: a passion which, in his later years, was his only cure for depression.

  I intended the article to be part of a larger work on the psychology — or psychopathology — of the compulsive collector. As it turned out, due to idleness and my ignorance of the languages, this particular foray into Middle European studies came to nothing. I remember the episode as a very enjoyable holiday, at others’ expense.

  On my way to Czechoslovakia I had stopped at Schloss Ambras, outside Innsbruck, to see the Kunstkammer or ‘cabinet of curiosities’ assembled by Rudolf’s uncle, Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol. (Uncle and nephew had a friendly but long-standing quarrel as to who should possess the Hapsburg family narwhal horn, and a Late Roman agate tazza that might or might not be the Holy Grail.)

  The Ambras Collection, with its Cellini salt-cellar and Montezuma’s headdress of quetzal plumes, had survived intact from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries when imperial officials, mindful of the revolutionary mob, removed its more spectacular treasures to Vienna. Rudolf’s treasures — his mandragoras, his basilisk, his bezoar stone, his unicorn cup, his gold-mounted coco-de-mer, his homunculus in alcohol, his nails from Noah’s Ark and the phial of dust from which God created Adam — had long ago vanished from Prague.

  All the same, I wanted to see the gloomy palacefortress, the Hradschin, where this secretive bachelor — who spoke Italian to his mistresses, Spanish to his God, German to his courtiers and Czech, seldom, to his rebellious peasants — would, for weeks on end, neglect the affairs of his Holy and Roman Empire and shut himself away with his astronomers (Tycho Brahé and Kepler were his protégés). Or search with his alchemists for the Philosopher’s Stone. Or debate with learned rabbis the mysteries of the Cabbala. Or, as the crises of his reign intensified, imagine himself a hermit in the mountains. Or have his portrait done by Arcimboldo, who painted the Emperor’s visage as a mound of fruit and vegetables, with a courgette and aubergine for the neck, and a radish for the Adam’s apple.

  Knowing no one in Prague, I asked a friend, a historian who specialised in the Iron Curtain countries, if there was anyone he’d recommend me to see.

  He replied that Prague was still the most mysterious of European cities, where the supernatural was always a possibility. The Czechs’ propensity to ‘bend’ before superior force was not necessarily a weakness. Rather, their metaphysical view of life encouraged them to look on acts of force as ephemera.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I could send you to any number of intellectuals. Poets, painters, filmmakers. ’ Providing I could face an interminable whine about the role of the artist in a totalitarian state, or wished to go to a party that would end in a partouse.

  I protested. Surely he was exaggerating?

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  He would be the last to denigrate a man who risked the labour camp for publishing a poem in a foreign journal. But, in his view, the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn’t raise a murmur against the Party or State – yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads.

  ‘With their silence,’ he said, ‘they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist.’

  Where else would one find, as he had, a tram-ticket salesman who was a scholar of the Elizabethan stage? Or a street-sweeper who had written a philosophical commentary on the Anaximander Fragment?

  He finished by observing that Marx’s vision of an age of infinite leisure had, in one sense, come true. The State, in its efforts to wipe out ‘traces of individualism’, offered limitless time for the intelligent individual to dream his private and heretical thoughts.

  I said my motive for visiting Prague was perhaps more frivolous than his – and I explained my interest in the Emperor Rudolf.

  ‘In that case I’ll send you to Utz,’ he said. ‘Utz is a Rudolf of our time.’

  Utz was the owner of a spectacular collection of Meissen porcelain which, through his adroit manoeuvres, had survived the Second World War and the years of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. By 1967 it numbered over a thousand pieces — all crammed into the tiny two-roomed flat on Široká Street.

  The Utzes of Krondorf had been a family of minor Saxon landowners with farms in the Sudetenland, prosperous enough to maintain a town house in Dresden, insufficiently grand to figure on the Almanach de Gotha. Among their ancestors they could point to a Crusading Knight. But better-born Saxons would pronounce their name with an air of bewilderment, even of disgust: ‘Utz? Utz? No. It is impossible. Who is this people?’

  There were reasons for their scorn. In Grimm’s Etymological Wordbook, ‘utz’ carries any number of negative connotations: ‘drunk’, ‘dimwit’, ‘cardsharp’, ‘dealer in dud horses’. ‘Heinzen, Kunzen, Utzen oder Butzen’, in the dialect of Lower Swabia, is the equivalent of ‘Any old Tom, Dick or Harry’.

  Utz’s father was killed on the Somme in 1916, not before he had redeemed the family honour by winning Germany’s highest military decoration ‘Pour le Mérite’. His widow, whom he had met at Marienbad in 1905 – and had married to the anguish of his parents – was the daughter of a Czech revivalist historian, and of a Jewish heiress whose fortune came from railway shares.

  Kaspar was her only grandchild.

  As a boy, he spent a month of each summer at České Křížové, a neo-mediaeval castle between Prague and Tabor where this wasted old woman, whose sallow skin refused to wrinkl
e or hair turn to grey, sat crippled with arthritis in a salon hung with crimson brocade and overvarnished paintings of the Virgin.

  A convert to Catholicism, she surrounded herself with unctuous and genuflecting priests who would extol the purity of her faith in the hope of financial rewards. The banks of begonias and cinerarias in her conservatory protected her from a magnificent sweep of the Central Bohemian countryside.

  Various neighbours were affronted that a woman of her race should affect the outward forms of aristocratic life: to the extent of peopling her staircase with suits of armour, and of keeping a bear in a walled-off section of the moat. Yet, even before Sarajevo, she had foreseen the rising tide of Socialism in Europe, and, twirling a terrestrial globe as another woman might recite the rosary, she would point a finger to the far-flung places in which she had diversified her investments: a copper-mine in Chile, cotton in Egypt, a cannery in Australia, gold in South Africa.

  She rejoiced in the thought that her fortune would go on increasing after her death. Theirs would vanish: in war or revolution; on horses, women and the gaming-tables. In Kaspar, a dark-haired, introspective boy with none of his father’s high complexion, she recognised the pallor of the ghetto – and adored him.

  It was at České Křížové that this precocious child, standing on tiptoe before a vitrine of antique porcelain, found himself bewitched by a figurine of Harlequin that had been modelled by the greatest of Meissen modellers, J. J. Kaendler.

  The Harlequin sat on a tree trunk. His taut frame was sheathed in a costume of multi-coloured chevrons. In one hand he waved an oxidised silver tankard; in the other a floppy yellow hat. Over his face there was a leering orange mask.