Utz Read online

  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.’

  At 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.’

  At 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 . . .’

  Utz 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 sympathe
tic. 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.

  Or the Argentine? ‘Grande mangeuse de viande’ — or so the waiter said. Utz had stood behind her baccarat table at the Casino, mesmerised by her scarlet talons; by the carefree gestures with which she manoeuvred her chips over the green baize; by the vein in her neck that bulged over her collar of pearls. Not her either! She was joined by her husband.

  And then he saw her, one afternoon, in the lobby: a tall, white-limbed woman in tennis whites, her dark hair plaited in a coif, slipping a cover over her racquet and thanking, in a tone of firm finality, the over-eager pro for his lesson.

  Utz heard her conversing in French, although he thought — or was he imagining this? — that he detected a Slavic resonance in her accent. She was not the athletic type: there was an oriental torpor in her movements. She might have been Turkish, this ‘femme en forme de violon’ with her appleblossom cheeks, her dimples, her quivering forelip and slanting green eyes. She wasn’t beautiful by modern standards: the kind of woman they once bred for the seraglio.

  ‘But she has to be Russian,’ he reflected. ‘Russian, certainly. With a touch of Tartar?’

  She was no longer young, and she seemed very sad.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of feverish excitement, waiting for her to re-emerge from the lift, and attempting to compose a history for her. He imagined the downward spiral of émigré life: the rented apartment in Monaco; later, when the jewels ran out, the lodgings in Paris where her father drove a taxi and played chess after hours. To pay for his medical bills, she had sacrificed herself to the businessman who kept her in a certain style, but also kept a younger mistress. He had taken the mistress to the Riviera and sent his wife, who was childless, to Vichy.

  She came downstairs before dinner, still alone, wearing a spotted grey dress and white open-toed shoes. And when Utz saw her little dog, a Sealyham, trailing at her heels, he called to mind the lady in the Chekhov tale and felt for certain the meeting must happen.

  He followed her at a distance into the park beside the Allier, stationing himself on a bench which she was almost sure to pass, inhaling the odour of lilac and philadelphus.

  ‘Viens, Maxi! Viens! Viens!’ — he heard her calling the dog; and when she came to a choice of forking paths, she chose the path that led towards him.

  ‘Bonsoir, Madame!’ Utz smiled, and was about to call ‘Maxi!’ to the dog. The woman gave a start, and quickened her pace.

  He continued to sit, miserably listening to the crunch of her footfalls on the gravel. At dinner, she passed his table and looked the other way.

  He saw her again in the morning, in the passenger seat of a silver sports car, her arms around the neck of the man at the wheel.

  He asked the concierge who she was and was told she was Belgian.

  He turned his attention to food.

  On his first day at Vichy he had bought, from a bookshop in the Rue Clemenceau, a ‘gastronomic guide’ to the region. He had always cared for his stomach, always befriended chefs.

  How often, in the war years, especially in moments of terror, did he recollect the pleasures of the table! The day the Gestapo took him for questioning, he had been unable to focus on the abstractions of death or deportation: only on the memory of a particular plate of haricots verts, at a restaurant by a white road in Provence.

  Later, during the worst of the winter shortages, the months of cabbage, cabbage, cabbage and potatoes, he comforted himself with the thought that, when sanity returned and the frontiers were open, he would eat once again in France.

  He studied the guide with the fastidious dedication he usually reserved for porcelain-hunting: where to find the best ‘quenelles aux écrevisses’, the best ‘cervelas truffé’ or a ‘poulet à la vessie’. Or the desserts — the ‘bourriouls’, ‘bougnettes’, ‘flaugnardes’, ‘fouasses’. (One could hear the gas in those names!) Or the rare white wine of Château Grillet, which was said to taste of vine flowers and almonds — and behave like a capricious young woman.

  Putting his new-found knowledge to the test, he reserved a table at a restaurant beside the Allier.

  The day was warm and sunny: sufficiently warm to eat outside on the terrace, under an awning of green-and-white striped canvas that flapped lazily in the breeze. There were three wine glasses set at each place. He watched the reflections of the poplars z-bending across the river, and the sand-martins skimming over its surface. On the far bank, fishermen and their families had spread their picnics on the grass.

  The waiters were fussing over a ‘prince of gastronomes’ who was paying his annual visit. He had come in after Utz, flushed crimson in the face and perambulating his stomach before him. He tucked his napkin inside his collar, and prepared to plough through an eight-course luncheon.

  At last, when the menu came, Utz gave a grateful smile to the maitre d’hôtel.

  He ran his eye over the list of specialities. He chose. He changed his mind. He chose again: an artichoke soup, trout ‘Mont Doré’ and sucking-pig ‘à la lyonnaise’.

  ‘Et comme vin, monsieur?’

  ‘What would you suggest?’

  The wine-waiter, taking Utz for an ignoramus, pointed to two of the more expensive bottles on the list: a Montrachet and a Clos Margeot.

  ‘No Château Grillet?’

  ‘Non, monsieur.’

  ‘Very well,’ Utz acquiesced obediently. ‘Whatever you recommend.’

  The meal failed to match his expectations. Not that he could fault its quality or presentation: but the soup, although exquisite, seemed savourless; the trout was smothered in a sauce of Gruyère cheese, and the sucking-pig was stuffed with something else.

  He looked again, enviously, at the picnickers on the opposite shore. A young mother rushed to save her child, who had crawled to the water’s edge. He would like to be with them: to share their coarse, home-made pies that surely tasted of something! Or had he lost his own sense of taste?

  The bill was larger than he expected. He left in a bad mood. He felt bloated, and a little dizzy.

  He had also come to a depressing conclusion: that luxury is only luxurious under adverse conditions.

  In the afternoon the clouds came up and it began to rain. He lay down in his room and read some pages of a novel by Gide. His French was inadequate: he lost the thread of the narrative.

  He put the book aside, and stared vacantly at the chandelier.

  Why, he asked himself, when he had steeled himself to the horrors of war and revolution, should the free world present so frightening an abyss? Why, each time he sank onto the mattress, did he have the sensation of falling, like the elevator, through the floors of the hotel? In Prague he slept soundly. Why did sleep elude him here?

  He would lie awake and fret over his finances. In Czechoslovakia he had no finances to speak of: or none that he could lay his hands on. Now, at two and three in the morning, he would spread his sharecertificates over the bedspread and tot up the figures of his portfolio, searching for a flaw, a mistake; trying to explain why, in a rising stock-market, his fortune in Switzerland had shrunk. Why, with enormous sums invested, were the sums on paper so small? Someone, somewhere was cheating him. Taking advantage while his back was turned! But who? And how?

  From the same bookshop he had bought a pocket atlas of the world; and, leafing through its pages, he tried to imagine the country he would like to live in. Or rather, the country that would make him least unhappy.

  Switzerland? Italy? France? Three possibilities. None of them inviting. Germany? Never. The break had been fina
l. England? Not after the Dresden raid. The United States? Impossible. The noise would depress him dreadfully. Prague, after all, was a city where you heard the snowflakes falling. Australia? He had never been attracted by the colonies. Argentina? He was too old to tango.

  The more he considered the alternatives, the clearer the solution seemed to him. Not that he would be happy in Czechoslovakia. He would be harassed, menaced, insulted. He would have to grovel. He would have to agree with every word they said. He would mouth their meaningless, ungrammatical formulae. He would learn to ‘live within the lie’.

  But Prague was a city that suited his melancholic temperament. A state of tranquil melancholy was all one could aspire to these days! And for the first time, grudgingly, he felt he could admire his Czech compatriots: not for their decision to vote in a Marxist government . . . Any fool knew by now that Marxism was a winded philosophy! He admired the abstemiousness of their choice.

  He continued to stare at the idiotic chandelier, turning over in his mind the most troublesome question of all.

  He was desperately homesick, yet hadn’t given a thought for the porcelains. He could only think of Marta, alone, in the apartment.

  He felt remorse for having left her: the poor darling who adored him; who would lay down her life for him; her passionate heart that beat for him, and him only, concealed under a mask of reserve, of duty and obedience.

  He had thought of taking her to the West. But she spoke no language other than Czech, and a few words of German. No. She’d be . . . he groped for the appropriate cliché . . . she’d be a fish out of water.

  He remembered the times when, breathless from climbing the stairs, the snowflakes twinkling on her fox fur hat, she would return from a successful deal on the black market. Her capacity for bargaining was prodigious, even with a single dollar bill.

  She would stand for hours in a food queue: nothing mattered if the object of her quest would bring him pleasure.