Utz Read online

  The scenario suggested by this unexpected costume set my imagination into turmoil.

  I pulled the lavatory chain. Outside, above the rush and gurgle of the water, I heard Utz and Marta remonstrating, in Czech.

  He was waiting to hustle me out of the bedroom. I was not to be hustled.

  I paused to admire an eighteenth-century engraving, of a fireworks display at the Zwinger. I saw a photograph of Utz’s father. I saw his illustrious decoration on its mount of black velvet. I saw a ‘Venetian’ blackamoor bed-table and, on it, a book by Schnitzler, and one by Stefan Zweig. I saw a large container of talcum-powder – or was it face-powder? – in front of the dressing-mirror. I saw three other unexpected items: a rosary, a crucifix and a scapular of the Infant of Prague. The frilly lace lampshade had been singed by its electric light bulb. The flounced pink curtains and pink satin eiderdown – both of which had seen better days – gave the room an atmosphere of musty, rather coarse femininity.

  I looked at Utz afresh in the light of this discovery. I looked at his shiny scalp. Was there perhaps, hidden under the skirts of the dressing-table, a wig?

  He was unable to look me in the eye. Instead, he tinkered with the gramophone and put on a record: a keyboard sonata by the Saxon court composer, Jan Dismas Zelenka.

  The maid reappeared and laid two places on the glass-topped table, banging down the knives and forks with a show of bad temper. She turned her back, and returned with a larger Meissen dish on which were arranged some pork chops, sauerkraut and dumplings in gravy.

  Utz ate with dulled concentration, pausing now and then to mouth a little bread, sip a little wine, but scarcely saying a word. He blinked at me: apparently furious with himself for having invited this inquisitive foreigner who had disturbed his peace of mind and might, in the long run, cause trouble.

  He cringed whenever the maid showed her face. After helping himself to seconds, he began to relax.

  He cut a cube of meat, impaled it, held it in the air, and addressed me, pedantically:

  ‘Each time I see a piece of pork on my fork, I must remind myself that “pork” and “porcelain” are the same word.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Really, you don’t know it?’

  ‘Really not.’

  ‘So I will explain.’

  He reached for one of the shelves and handed me a small white cowrie shell, an ordinary specimen of ‘Cypraea moneta’. Did its shape, by any chance, remind me of a pig?

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We agree on that one also.’

  Cowries, he went on, were used as currency in Africa and Asia where they were traded for ivory, gold, slaves or other marketable commodities. Marco Polo called them ‘porcelain shells’: ‘porcella’ in Italian was the word for ‘little sow’.

  He let out a perfect hiccough, probably caused by the sauerkraut.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  He then produced, as if from nowhere, a bottle of translucent white porcelain which dated from the epoch of Kublai Khan. He had bought it in Paris before the War. Wouldn’t I agree that its glaze resembled that of a cowrie?

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  His next exhibit was the photo of an almost identical bottle in the Treasury of St Mark’s: an object which was said to have arrived in Venice in the bags of Marco Polo himself.

  ‘So now you understand about “pork” and “porcelain”?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  Chinese porcelain, he continued, was one of those legendary substances, like unicorn horn or alchemical gold, from which men hoped to drink the Fountain of Youth. A porcelain cup was said to crack or discolour if poison were poured into it.

  Marta cleared the table, served coffee, and opened a box of Carlsbad plums. Utz hiccoughed again and bombarded me with a flood of questions.

  Had I been to China? Had I read the letters of Father Matteo Ricci? Or Father d’Entrecolles’ description of porcelain manufacture? How serious, really, was my understanding of Chinese porcelain? Under the Sung? The Ming? The Ch’ing?

  From the seventeenth century, he said, the Emperors of China had made a colossal impact on the European imagination. They were thought to be very wise and to live to a very great age, dispensing arbitrary, impartial justice according to laws derived from Earth and Heaven. They drank from porcelain. They built pagodas of porcelain. The smooth and lustrous surface of porcelain corresponded to the smooth, unwrinkled surface of themselves. Porcelain was their material – as gold was the material of the Roi Soleil.

  ‘And even today,’ Utz added flippantly, ‘our Soviet friends are never too poor to pay for gilding.’

  ‘Then would you say’, I interrupted, ‘that your Augustus’s porcelain-mania was conditioned by legends of the Yellow Emperor?’

  ‘Say it? Of course, I would say it! And not only kings loved porcelain. Philosophers also! Leibniz was crazy for porcelain!’

  Leibniz — who had believed this world was the best of all possible worlds — believed that porcelain was its best material.

  The maid stood motionless in the hallway, fixing her employer with a hostile stare, as if requiring him to end the interview. He took no notice:

  ‘Now will you look please at these two little persons?’

  ‘These’ were a pair of identical statuettes of Augustus the Strong, wreathed as a Roman Emperor and standing like Tweedledum and Tweedledee amid the Dresden ladies. They were not modelled with much sophistication — yet had the concentrated energy of an African fetish.

  One was made of red Böttger ware, the so-called ‘jasper-porcelain’. The other was white.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Utz, ‘what you know about Böttger.’

  ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘He began as an alchemist, and then he invented porcelain.’

  ‘He may have invented porcelain. But even that is not so sure.’

  I reached for my notebook. He reeled off a synopsis of Böttger’s career.

  Johannes Böttger is born in 1682, in Schleiz in Thuringia, the son of an official of the Mint. After a childhood in the workshop of his grandfather, a goldsmith, he is apprenticed to a Berlin apothecary by the name of Zorn.

  He studies books on alchemy: the Blessed Raymond Lull, Basilius Valentinus, Paracelsus and Van Helmont’s ‘Aphorismi Chemici’ in which alchemical substances are listed as the Ruby Lion, Black Raven, Green Dragon, and White Lily.

  He convinces himself that gold and silver are matured in the bowels of the earth, out of red and white arsenic. One night, his fellow apprentices find him in Zorn’s laboratory half-asphyxiated by arsenic fumes.

  Among the customers of the pharmacy is a Greek mendicant monk, Lascaris, who is reputed to possess the Red Tincture, or ‘Ruby Lion’, a grain of which will transmute lead into gold.

  The monk falls for the boy.

  Böttger obtains a phial of the tincture and performs his first ‘successful’ transmutation, in the lodgings of a student friend. The second ‘successful’ experiment takes place in front of Zorn and other sceptical witnesses.

  The ladies of Berlin find the young alchemist irresistible. His reputation spreads: to King Frederick William, the ‘Giant Lover’, who obtains a specimen of the gold from Frau Zorn – and issues a warrant for Böttger’s arrest.

  Böttger escapes to Wittenberg: a dependency of Augustus the Strong.

  In November 1701 the Kings of Prussia and Saxony hold military manoeuvres along their borders. Which of these indigent sovereigns shall possess the goldmaker? Böttger — like a fugitive nuclear physicist — is escorted to Dresden under armed guard.

  In the Jungfernbastei, one of several prisons he will occupy over the next thirteen years, he dines off silver plate, keeps a pet monkey and, in a secret laboratory, sets to work on the ‘arcanum universale’ or Philosopher’s Stone.

  By 1706 the Saxon Treasury is exhausted: from the cost of the Swedish
War and the King’s compulsive purchases of Chinese porcelain. Augustus, infuriated by Bottger’s failure, threatens to remove him to another laboratory: the torture chamber.

  Böttger meets Ehrenfried Walther, Graf von Tschirnhaus. This outstanding chemist, the friend of Leibniz, is on the way to discovering the secret of ‘true’ porcelain, but cannot devise a kiln sufficiently hot to fuse the glaze and the body. He recognises Böttger’s talents, and asks for his co-operation. The alchemist, to save his skin, agrees.

  Over the door of this workshop Böttger hangs a notice:God, Our Creator

  Has turned a Goldmaker into a Potter.

  In 1708 he delivers to Augustus the first specimens of red porcelain and, in the following year, the white.

  In 1710 the Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory is founded at Meissen and begins work on a commercial scale. ‘Arcanum’ — a word usually employed by alchemists – is the official term for the chemical composition of the paste. The formula is declared a State secret. Almost at once, the secret is betrayed by Böttger’s assistant — and sold to Vienna.

  In 1719 Böttger dies, of drink, depression, delusion and chemical poisoning.

  During the German inflation of 1923 the Dresden banks issue emergency money, in red and white ‘Böttger’ porcelain.

  Utz had some specimens of this ‘funny money’ to show me. He dropped them, like chocolates, into the palm of my hand.

  ‘Very interesting,’ I said.

  ‘But now I tell you something more interesting.’

  Most porcelain experts, he continued, interpreted Böttger’s discovery as the utilitarian by-product of alchemy – like Paracelsus’s mercurial cure for syphilis.

  He did not agree. He felt it was foolish to attribute to former ages the materialist concerns of this one. Alchemy, except among its more banal practitioners, was never a technique for multiplying wealth ad infinitum. It was a mystical exercise. The search for gold and the search for porcelain had been facets of an identical quest: to find the substance of immortality.

  As for himself, he had taken up alchemical studies on the advice of Zikmund Kraus: both as a field for his polymathic impulses, and as a means of elevating his ‘porcelain mania’ onto a metaphysical plane: so that if the Communists took the collection, he would none the less continue to possess it.

  Utz had read his Jung, his Goethe, Michael Maier, the ramblings of Dr Dee and Pernéty’s ‘Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique’. He knew all there was to be known about the ‘mother of alchemy’ Mary the Jewess, a third-century chemist who is said to have invented the retort.

  Chinese alchemists, he went on, used to teach that gold was the ‘body of the gods’. Christians, with their insistence on simplification, equated it with the Body of Christ: the perfect, untarnishable substance, an elixir which could snatch one from the Jaws of Death. But was this gold gold as we knew it? Or an ‘aurum potabile’, to be drunk?

  Jewels and metals, he said, were thought to mature in the womb of the earth. As a pallid foetus matured into a creature of flesh and blood, so crystals reddened into rubies, silver into gold. An alchemist believed he could speed up the process with the help of the two ‘tinctures’: the White Stone, with which base metals were converted into silver; the Red Stone which was ‘the last work of alchemy’ — gold itself! Did I understand that?

  ‘I hope so,’ I said weakly.

  He shifted to a different tack.

  What did I know of the homunculus of Paracelsus? Nothing? Well, Paracelsus had claimed to create a homunculus from a fermentation of blood, sperm and urine.

  ‘A kind of test-tube baby?’

  ‘More probably a kind of golem.’

  ‘I knew we’d get back to golems,’ I said.

  ‘We have,’ he agreed.

  Would I now please reflect on the fact that Nebuchadnezzar had the burning fiery furnace heated to seven times its normal temperature when he put in Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?

  ‘Seven times, I ask you!’ Utz waved his hands in the air.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were ceramic figures?’

  ‘They could have been,’ he answered. ‘They certainly survived the fire.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘So you do think the porcelains are alive?’

  ‘I do and I do not,’ he sniggered. ‘Porcelains die in the fire, and then they come alive again. The kiln, you must understand, is Hell. The temperature for firing porcelain is 1,450 degrees centigrade.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Utz’s flights of fancy made me feel quite dizzy. He appeared to be saying that the earliest European porcelain — Böttger’s red ware and white ware — corresponded to the red and white tinctures of the alchemists. To a superstitious old roué like Augustus, the manufacture of porcelain was an approach to the Philosopher’s Stone.

  If this were so: if, to the eighteenth-century imagination, porcelain was not just another exotic, but a magical and talismanic substance — the substance of longevity, of potency, of invulnerability — then it was easier to understand why the King would stuff a palace with forty thousand pieces. Or guard the ‘arcanum’ like a secret weapon. Or swap the six hundred giants.

  Porcelain, Utz concluded, was the antidote to decay.

  The illusion was, of course, shattered by Frederick the Great who simply loaded the contents of the Meissen factory onto ox-carts and sent it, as booty, to Berlin.

  ‘But Frederick,’ Utz fluttered his eyelids, ‘ . . . and with all that musical talent! . . . was really an absolute philistine!’

  The room was almost in darkness. It was a warm night, and a soft breeze ruffled the net curtains. On the carpet, the animals from the Japanese Palace shimmered like lumps of phosphorescence.

  ‘Marta!’ he called. ‘A light please!’

  The maid came in with a Meissen candlestick, and set it carefully in the centre of the table. She put a match to the candle. Innumerable points of flame were reflected in the walls.

  Utz changed the record on the gramophone: to the recitative of Zerbinetta and Harlequin from Strauss’s ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’.

  I have said that Utz’s face was ‘waxy in texture’, but now in the candlelight its texture seemed like melted wax. I looked at the ageless complexion of the Dresden ladies. Things, I reflected, are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more age-ing than a collection of works of art.

  One by one, he lifted the characters of the Commedia from the shelves, and placed them in the pool of light where they appeared to skate over the glass of the table, pivoting on their bases of gilded foam, as if they would forever go on laughing, whirling, improvising.

  Scaramouche would strum on his guitar.

  Brighella would liberate people’s purses.

  The Captain would swagger childishly like all army officers.

  The Doctor would kill his patient in order to rid him of his disease.

  The coils of spaghetti would be eternally poised above Pulchinella’s nostrils.

  Pantaloon would gloat over his money-bags.

  The Innamorata, like all transvestites everywhere, would be mobbed on his way to the theatre.

  Columbine would be endlessly in love with Harlequin – ‘absolutely mad to trust him’.

  And Harlequin . . . The Harlequin . . . the arch-improviser, the zany, trickster, master of the volteface . . . would forever strut in his variegated plumage, grin through his orange mask, tiptoe into bedrooms, sell nappies for the children of the Grand Eunuch, dance in the teeth of catastrophe . . . Mr Chameleon himself!

  And I realised, as Utz pivoted the figure in the candlelight, that I had misjudged him; that he, too, was dancing; that, for him, this world of little figures was the real world. And that, compared to them, the Gestapo, the Secret Police and other hooligans were creatures of tinsel. And the events of this sombre century – the bombardments, blitzkriegs, putsches, purges — were, so far as he was concerned, so many �
�noises off’

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘we shall go. We shall go for a walk.’

  On my way out, I thanked Marta for cooking supper. A wan smile passed across her face. Without getting off her stool, she inclined her torso stiffly from the waist.

  It was a very warm and sultry night, and moths were whirling round the street lamps. In Old Town Square, crowds of young people had congregated at the foot of the Jan Hus Memorial. They seemed fresh and full of vigour: the boys in white open-necked shirts; the girls in old-fashioned cotton dresses.

  The stars came out behind the spires of the Týn Church and, to peals of organ music, more people began to file through the arcades of the Divinity School, on their way from Mass. ‘Prague Spring’ was almost a year away: yet I remember an atmosphere of optimism. I remember being taken aback when Utz turned on me, and bared his teeth.

  ‘I hate this city,’ he said.

  ‘Hate it? How can you hate it? You said it was a beautiful city.’

  ‘I hate it. I hate it.’

  ‘Things will get better,’ I said. ‘Things can only get better.’

  ‘You are wrong. Things will never get better.’

  He shook my hand and gave a curt bow.

  ‘Goodnight, my young friend,’ he said. ‘Remember what I said. I will leave you now. I will go to the brothel.’

  That winter I sent Utz a Christmas card and got a postcard in return – of the tomb-slab of Tycho Brahé — hoping that when I next returned to Prague I would call him.

  During the months that followed, as the world watched the activities of Comrade Dubček, I tried to imagine Utz’s reaction to the events, wondering if he still stuck to his guns: that things would never, ever get better.

  As the summer wore on, despite noises in the Soviet press, it seemed less and less likely that Brezhnev would send in the tanks. But one night, as I drove into Paris, the Boulevard Saint-Germain was closed to traffic, and police with riot-shields were pushing back a surge of demonstrators.