Utz Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘Aah!’ he nodded gloomily. ‘I know it. Mr Utz will pay.’

  ‘And now,’ Utz turned to me, ‘you will permit me to show you some monuments of our beautiful city.’

  Utz and I spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through the thinly peopled streets of Malá Strana, pausing now and then to admire the blistering façade of a merchant’s house, or some Baroque or Rococo palace — the Vrtba, the Pálffy, the Lobkovic: he recited their names as though the builders were intimate friends.

  In the Church of Our Lady Victorious, the waxen Spanish image of the Christ Child, aureoled in an explosion of gold, seemed less the Blessed Babe of Bethlehem than the vengeful divinity of the Counter-Reformation.

  We climbed the length of Neruda Street and walked around the Hradschin: the scene of my futile researches during the previous week. We then sat in an orchard below the Strahov Monastery. A man in his underpants sunned himself on the grass. The fluff of balsam poplars floated by, and settled on our clothes like snowflakes.

  ‘You will see,’ said Utz, waving his malacca over the multiplicity of porticoes and cupolas below us. ‘This city wears a tragic mask.’

  It was also a city of giants: giants in stone, in stucco or marble; naked giants; blackamoor giants; giants dressed as if for a hurricane, not one of them in repose, struggling with some unseen force, or heaving under the weight of architraves.

  ‘The suffering giant’, he added without conviction, ‘is the emblem of our persecuted people.’

  I commented facetiously that a taste for giants was usually a symptom of decline: an age that took the Farnese Hercules for an ideal was bound to end in trouble.

  Utz countered with the story of Frederick William of Prussia who had once made a collection of real giants — semi-morons mostly – to swell the ranks of his Potsdam Grenadiers.

  He then explained how this weakness for giants had led to one of the most bizarre diplomatic transactions of the eighteenth century: in which Augustus of Saxony chose 127 pieces of Chinese porcelain from the Palace of Charlottenburg, in Berlin, and gave in return 600 giants ‘of the required height’ collected in the eastern provinces.

  ‘I never liked giants,’ he said.

  ‘I once met a man,’ I said, ‘who was a dealer in dwarfs.’

  ‘Oh?’ he blinked. ‘Dwarfs, you say?’

  ‘Dwarfs.’

  ‘Where did you meet this man?’

  ‘On a plane to Baghdad. He was going to view a dwarf for a client.’

  ‘A client! This is wonderful!’

  ‘He had two clients,’ I said. ‘One was an Arab oil sheikh. The other owned hotels in Pakistan.’

  ‘And what did they do with those dwarfs?’ Utz tapped me on the knee.

  He had paled with excitement and was mopping the sweat from his brow.

  ‘Kept them,’ I said. ‘The sheikh, if I remember right, liked to sit his favourite dwarf on his forearm and his favourite falcon on the dwarfs forearm.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘How can one know?’

  ‘You are right,’ said Utz. ‘These are things one cannot know.’

  ‘Or would want to.’

  ‘And what would cost a dwarf? These days?’

  ‘Who can say? Collecting dwarfs has always been expensive.’

  ‘That’s a nice story,’ he smiled at me. ‘Thank you. I also like dwarfs. But not in the way you think.’

  It was now early evening and we were sitting on a slatted seat in the Old Jewish Cemetery. Pigeons were burbling on the roof of the Klausen Synagogue. The sunbeams, falling through sycamores, lit up spirals of midges and landed on the mossy tombstones, which, heaped one upon the other, resembled seaweed-covered rocks at low-tide.

  To our right, a party of American Hasids – pale, short-sighted youths in yarmulkes — were laying pebbles on the tomb of the Great Rabbi Loew. They posed for a photograph, with their backs to its scrolling headstone.

  Utz told me how the original ghetto – that warren of secret passages and forgotten rooms so vividly described by Meyrink – had been replaced by apartment buildings after the slum clearances of the 1890s. The synagogues, the cemetery and the Old Town Hall were almost the only monuments to survive. These, he said, far from being destroyed by the Nazis, were spared to form a proposed Museum of Jewry, where Aryan tourists of the future would inspect the relics of a people as lost as the Aztecs or Hottentots.

  He changed the subject.

  ‘You have heard tell the story of the Golem?’

  ‘I have,’ I said. ‘The Golem was an artificial man . . . a mechanical man . . . a prototype of the robot. He was a creation of the Rabbi Loew.’

  ‘My friend,’ he smiled,
‘you know, I think, many things. But you have many things to know.’

  The Rabbi Loew had been the undisputed leader of Prague Jewry in the reign of the Emperor Rudolf: never again would the Jews of Middle Europe enjoy such esteem and privilege. He entertained princes and ambassadors, and was entertained by his sovereign in the Hradschin. Many of his writings – among them the homily ‘On the Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart’ – were absorbed into the teachings of Hasidism. Like any other Cabbalist he believed that every event – past, present and future – was already written down in the Torah.

  After his death, the Rabbi was inevitably credited with supernatural powers. There are tales – none dating from his lifetime – of how, with an abracadabra, he moved a castle from the Bohemian countryside to the Prague ghetto. Or told the Emperor to his face that his real father was a Jew. Or trounced the mad Jesuit, Father Thaddeus, and proved the Jews were innocent of blood guilt. Or fashioned Yossel the Golem from the glutinous mud of the River Vltava.

  All golem legends derived from an Ancient Jewish belief that any righteous man could create the World by repeating, in an order prescribed by the Cabbala, the letters of the secret name of God. ‘Golem’ meant ‘unformed’ or ‘uncreated’ in Hebrew. Father Adam himself had been ‘golem’ – an inert mass of clay so vast as to cover the ends of the Earth: that is, until Yahweh shrank him to human scale and breathed into his mouth the power of speech.

  ‘So you see,’ said Utz, ‘not only was Adam the first human person. He was also the first ceramic sculpture.’

  ‘Are you suggesting your porcelains are alive?’

  ‘I am and I am not,’ he said. ‘They are alive and they are dead. But if they were alive, they would also have to die. Is it not?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Good. So I say it.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Go on about golems.’

  One of Utz’s favourite golem stories was a mediaeval text discovered by Gershom Scholem: wherein it was written that Jesus Christ (‘like our friend J. J. Kaendler’) used to make model birds from clay – which, once He had uttered the sacred formula, would sing, flap their wings and fly.

  A second story (‘Oh! What a Jewish story!’) told of two hungry rabbis who, having fashioned the figure of a calf, brought it to life – then cut its throat and ate veal for supper.

  As for making a golem, a recipe in the Sepher Yetzirah or ‘Book of Creation’ called for a quantity of untouched mountain soil. This was to be kneaded with fresh spring water and, from it, a human image formed. The maker was required to recite over each of the image’s limbs the appropriate alphabetical combination. He then walked around it clockwise a number of times: whereupon the golem stood and lived. Were he to reverse the direction, the creature would revert to clay.

  None of the earlier sources say whether or not a golem could speak. But the automaton did have the gift of memory and would obey orders mechanically, without reflection, providing these were given at regular intervals. If not, the golem might run amok.

  Golems also gained in stature, inch by inch, every day: yearning, it would seem, to attain the gigantic size of the Cosmic Adam – and so crush their creators and overwhelm the world.

  ‘There was no end’, said Utz, ‘to the size of golems. Golems were highly dangerous.’

  A golem was said to wear a slip of metal known as the ‘shem’, either across its forehead or under its tongue. The ‘shem’ was inscribed with the Hebrew word ‘emeth’, or Truth of God. When a rabbi wished to destroy his golem, he had only to pluck out the opening letter, so that ‘emeth’ now read ‘meth’ — which is to say ‘death’ – and the golem dissolved.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘The “shem” was a kind of battery?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Without which the machine wouldn’t work?’

  ‘Also.’

  ‘And the Rabbi Loew . . . ?’

  ‘Wanted a servant. He was a good Jewish businessman. He wanted a servant without paying wages.’

  ‘And a servant that wouldn’t answer back!’

  Yossel was the name of the Rabbi Loew’s golem. On weekdays he did all sorts of menial tasks. He chopped wood, swept the street and the synagogue, and acted as watchdog in case the Jesuits got up to mischief. Yet on the Sabbath – since all God’s creatures must rest on the Sabbath – his master would remove the ‘shem’ and render him lifeless for a day.

  One Sabbath the Rabbi forgot to do this, and Yossel went berserk. He pulled down houses, threw rocks, threatened people and tore up trees by the roots. The congregation had already filled the Altneu Synagogue for morning prayers, and was chanting the 92nd Psalm: ‘My horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of the unicorn . . .’ The Rabbi rushed into the street and snatched the ‘shem’ from the monster’s forehead.

  Another version places the ‘death’, amid old books and prayer-shawls, in the loft of the synagogue.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘would a golem have had Jewish features?’

  ‘Not!’ Utz answered with a touch of impatience. ‘The golem was always a servant. Servants in Jewish houses were always of the goyim.’

  ‘Would a golem have had Nordic features?’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Giants’ features.’

  Utz brooded for a while and then arrived at the crux of the discussion:

  All these tales suggested that the golem-maker had acquired arcane secrets: yet, in doing so, had transgressed Holy Law. A man-made figure was a blasphemy. A golem, by its presence alone, issued a warning against idolatry – and actively beseeched its own destruction.

  ‘Would you say then’, I asked, ‘that art-collecting is idolatry?’

  ‘Ja! Ja!’ he struck his chest. ‘Of course! Of course! That is why we Jews . . . and in this matter I consider myself a Jew . . . are so good at it! Because it is forbidden . . . ! Because it is sinful . . . ! Because it is dangerous . . . !’

  ‘Do your porcelains demand their own death?’

  He stroked his chin.

  ‘I do not know. It is a very problematical question.’

  The other visitors had left. A black cat had positioned itself on the crest of a tombstone. The guardian told us it was time to leave.

  ‘And now my friend,’ said Utz, ‘would it amuse you to see my collection of dwarfs?’

  An odour of suppurating cabbage leaves seeped from a dustbin in the entrance hall. A rat hopped off as we approached. In an apartment on the second landing, a baby wailed and someone was trying to master one of Dvořák’s ‘Slavonic Dances’ on an out-of-tune piano. On the third landing a woman opened her door to see who was passing: a hysterical face under a heap of auburn curls. She wore a peignoir of magenta peonies, and vehemently slammed the door shut.

  ‘She is mad,’ Utz apologised. ‘She was a famous soprano.’

  On the top floor, he caught his breath, fumbled for his latch-key and ushered me inside. The smell was familiar to me: the stale smell of rooms where works of art are kept, and dusting considered dangerous. In a dingy green kitchenette off the hallway, Utz’s servant sat perched on a stool.

  She was a solid woman dressed awkwardly in a maid’s uniform, with glowing cheeks and sandy hair flecked with grey. Over a black woollen dress there was a frilly white apron and, across her forehead, a fillet of lace. Her legs were encased in black stockings, which had a pair of white ‘potatoes’ at the knee.

  She was expecting us.

  In her lap she cradled a dish of emblazoned white porcelain which, I knew from my ‘arty’ days, was a piece of the celebrated Swan Service made by Kaendler for the Saxon First Minister, Count Brühl. On it she had arranged some slivers of cheese and crackers, Hungarian salami and rounds of pickled cucumber cut in the form of flowers.

  She bowed her head deferentially.

  ‘Guten Abend, Herr Baron.’

  ‘Guten Abend, Marta,’ he returned her greeting.

  We moved into the room. Behind the net curtain, a single north-facing window looked out over the tree
s of the cemetery.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a baron,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he blushed. ‘I am a baron also.’

  The room, to my surprise, was decorated in the ‘modern style’: almost devoid of furniture apart from a daybed, a glass-topped table and a pair of Barcelona chairs upholstered in dark green leather. Utz had ‘rescued’ these in Moravia, from a house built by Mies van der Rohe.

  It was a narrow room, made narrower by the double bank of plate-glass shelves, all of them crammed with porcelain, that reached from floor to ceiling. The shelves were backed with mirror, so that you had the illusion of entering an enfilade of glittering chambers, a ‘dream palace’ multiplied to infinity, through which human forms flitted like insubstantial shadows.

  The carpet was grey. You had to watch your step for fear of tripping over one of the white porcelain sculptures – a pelican, a turkey-cock, a bear, a lynx and a rhino – modelled either by Kaendler or Eberlein for the Japanese Palace in Dresden. All five were scarred with fissures caused by faults in the firing.

  Utz waved to some bottles on the table: scotch, slivovic, and a soda siphon.

  ‘It is scotch, isn’t it?’

  ‘Scotch,’ I said.

  At the whoosh of the siphon, the maid emerged with her canapes on the Swan Service dish. Her movements seemed so lifeless and mechanical you would have thought that Utz had created a female golem. Yet I detected the suggestion of a superior smile.

  ‘Cheerio!’ said Utz, mimicking an English gentleman’s accent.

  ‘Your health!’ I raised my glass – and took stock of my surroundings.

  I am not an expert on Meissen porcelain – although my years of traipsing round art museums have taught me what it is. Nor can I say I like Meissen porcelain. I do, however, admire the boisterous energy of an artist such as Kaendler, at play with a medium which was totally new. And I entirely side with Utz in his feud with Winckelmann – who, in his ‘Notes on the Plebeian Taste in Porcelain’, would supplant this plebeian vitality with the dead hand of classical perfection.