Utz

  Some days, she filled her shopping-bag with muddy potatoes. No one knew better that the type of policeman who would pry among her purchases was the type to mind muddying his hands. And afterwards, when she had dumped the potatoes in the sink, she would pull from the bottom of the bag a pheasant or a hare that someone had brought in from the country.

  Her contacts with the countryside functioned like the bush-telegraph.

  ‘Where did you get those eggs?’ he’d ask, as she rushed a golden soufflé to the table.

  ‘A woman brought them,’ she would answer vaguely.

  She understood, by instinct, why he insisted on the details: the sauce in a sauceboat; the starching of shirt-cuffs; the Sèvres coffee cups on Sunday – for a coffee composed of roasted barley and chicory! – the minor acts of style to demonstrate that he had not given in.

  He recognised her attentions as the tokens of her love. He could not bring himself to thank her: nor would she have wanted this.

  Their happiest time together was the mushroom season, towards the end of August, after the first late summer cloudbursts. They would catch the early morning train to Tábor; the bus to České Křížové; and from there, taking care to avoid the big house, take their picnic into the woods.

  Mushrooms, he said, were the only reason for revisiting the scenes of his childhood.

  He and Marta were like children at play, oblivious of caste or class, as they called to one another through the pine trunks: ‘Look what I’ve found . . . ! Look what I’ve found . . . !’ – a russet-cowled boletus, an edible agaric, or a cluster of chanterelles pushing their orange caps above a carpet of moss.

  No one but they and a few woodcutters knew the clearing where, as master of the estate, he had sawn himself a rustic table and seat: from the timbers of a beech tree that had been split by lightning.

  They would spread their finds on the table, gills uppermost, discarding those which were spongy or grub-ridden, cleaning off the larger lumps of earth yet leaving the odd pine-needle or a scrap of fern frond.

  ‘Don’t clean them too much,’ she would scold him. ‘A bit of dirt makes them taste much better.’

  Then she fried them in butter over a spirit stove, and stirred in a dollop of cream.

  One day, on their way back to Prague, they stopped in the town square at Tábor where local mushroom fanciers had set up stalls, under awnings of sackcloth to prevent the sun from shrivelling their treasures.

  A hubbub of cheerful voices greeted him. A peasant woman, a white headscarf wrapped low over her weather-beaten face, stood up and cried, ‘Look! It’s the master come back!’ He watched his old doctor, a mushroom fanatic, bartering furiously with a professional mycologist from the university over some very rare specimen. And there was Marianna Palach! — the laundrywoman, wizened to a husk now, who none the less went mushrooming, and had set up shop.

  Everyone in the market was laughing, haggling, giving, taking, proving beyond all doubt, whatever the zealots had to say, that the business of trade was one of life’s most natural and enjoyable pleasures, no more to be abolished than the act of falling in love . . .

  ‘What am I doing here?’ Utz roused himself from his daydream.

  He looked at his wristwatch. He was late for dinner. He knotted his tie in front of the bathroom mirror. He trimmed his moustache. (I still cannot be certain if I’m imagining a moustache.) He examined his stubborn little mouth, and said, ‘No!’

  He was not going to join the flow of exiles. He would not sit complaining in rented rooms. He knew that anti-Communist rhetoric was as deadly as its Communist counterpart. He would not give up his country. Not for them!

  He would go back. But he knew that, once he got back, the porcelains would re-exert the power of snobbery. The ladies of the Dresden court would turn their vitreous smiles on Marta, dismissing her to the kitchenette – where she would sit, patiently, in her shabby maid’s uniform and black stockings with holes at the knee.

  He went down to dinner in the restaurant. At a table nearby, a pair of married couples were engaged in a merciless argument over the merits or otherwise of an ‘Alaska’, an ‘Île flottante’ or an ‘Omelette norvégienne’. The women had rasping voices. The men were fat and wore rings.

  Their menu seemed to consist entirely of desserts: a Mont Blanc, profiterolles, a fruit salad, a tarte Tatin, a raspberry ice with chantilly, a chocolate cake with more chantilly . . .

  ‘This is disgusting,’ Utz muttered. ‘No. It is impossible I should stay here.’

  He rose from the table and told the receptionist he would be leaving on the morning train.

  It depressed him, on crossing the Czech frontier, to see the lines of barbed wire and sentry-boxes. But he noted, with a certain relief, that there were no more advertising billboards.

  Utz was one of those rare individuals who, throughout the Cold War, persisted in the illusion that the Iron Curtain was essentially flimsy. Because of his investments in the West — and powers of persuasion that mystified both himself and the bureaucrats of Prague — he succeeded in keeping a foot in both camps.

  Year after year, he made the ritual pilgrimage to Vichy. By the end of April, his resentment against the regime rose to boiling-point: for its incompetence, nothing more – he considered it common to complain of collectivisation. By April, too, he felt acute claustrophobia, from having spent the winter months in close proximity to the adoring Marta: to say nothing of the boredom, verging on fury, that came from living those months with lifeless porcelain.

  Before leaving, he would make a resolution never, ever to return – while at the same time making arrangements for his return — and would set off for Switzerland in the best of spirits.

  The journey was always the same: to Geneva, for meetings with his bankers and an antiquaire: on to Vichy, and to Vichy only, to taste the waters, to breathe the fresh air of freedom that rapidly went stale, and order more expensive meals which would disgust him.

  He would then bolt for home like a man pursued by demons.

  One year, he went to Paris for the week-end: but that completely upset his equilibrium.

  These arrangements suited no one except himself. For Marta, his absence was a time of torment, almost of mourning. For the officials who issued his exit visa – men who seriously believed that so incurable a decadent belonged in Vichy, America or some such corrupted place, and who. prided themselves on their leniency in letting him go – his return was the act of a madman.

  It was equally puzzling to a succession of consuls in the French and Swiss embassies. Accustomed, as they were, to think of Czechoslovakia as a country from which people of Utz’s standing fled, in an eastwesterly direction, the idea that any normal person might prefer home to exile seemed excessively perverse: an act of ingratitude. Or was there some sinister motive? Was M. Utz a spy?

  No. He was not a spy. As he explained to me in the course of our afternoon stroll, Czechoslovakia was a pleasant place to live, providing one had the possibility of leaving. At the same time he admitted, with a self-deprecating smile, that his severe case of Porzellankrankheit prevented him from leaving for good. The collection held him prisoner.

  ‘And, of course, it has ruined my life!’

  In an unguarded moment he also confessed to a secret cache of Meissen, stored in a numbered safe deposit, in the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva.

  Whenever his share prices rose above a certain level, he siphoned off a sum of money to pay for yet another object: the calculation being that if, over the years, the cache in Geneva approached the quality, not necessarily the quantity, of the collection in Prague, he might once again be tempted to emigrate.

  One year – I believe it was 1963 – the New York dealer, Dr Marius Frankfurter, made a special trip to Vichy to offer Utz a piece of porcelain that was quite outside his usual range: a model known as ‘The Spaghetti Eater’, made not at Meissen, but at the CapodiMonte factory in Naples.

  In the same baby blue bedroom, Dr Frankfurter unwrapp
ed the object from its multiple layers of tissue-paper and set it on the commode, with the reverence of a priest exhibiting the Host. Utz could hardly help comparing its pearly glaze with the warted epidermis of the dealer. But that was life! The ugliest men loved the most beautiful things.

  ‘So?’ said Dr Frankfurter.

  ‘So,’ Utz pursed his lips.

  The object was adorable. He was not going to say so.

  A figure of Pulchinella – the ‘Charlie Chaplin’ of the Italian Comedy — sat lounging in a kind of invalid chair, wearing a collarette of green lace over a loose linen shirt, and a conical white hat like that of a dancing dervish. At his side, a Neapolitan lad, in a scarlet cap and purple breeches, was feeding him from a chamber pot.

  Utz was particularly taken with the coils of spaghetti, poised either to plunge into Pulchinella’s mouth – or into one of his cavernous nostrils.

  But the price! Even Dr Frankfurter seemed in awe of the price, and could only bring himself to mention it in a whisper.

  ‘Well,’ said Utz, after recovering from the initial shock. ‘I’ve never bought a piece of Italian porcelain in my life. How would I know it was genuine?’

  ‘Tschenuin?’ Dr Frankfurter spluttered.

  Of course it was genuine! And Utz, of course, knew it was genuine. He was simply playing for time.

  But the Doctor was aggrieved. He threatened to re-wrap the piece in its tissue: only to relent and reel off a tremendous pedigree of the noble Italian families to whom it had belonged – names that meant no more to Utz than a list of railway stations from Ventimiglia to Bari – until, in a crescendo of name-dropping, he arrived at Queen Maria Amalia herself.

  ‘Oh?’ said Utz. ‘It belonged to her, did it?’

  For he knew – and Dr Frankfurter knew he knew – that, before becoming Queen of Naples, this plain and pox-pitted woman had been a Princess of Saxony, and was the granddaughter of Augustus the Strong.

  It was she who, in 1739, had founded the Naples factory, hardly a stone’s throw from the Palace, as a project to divert her Germanic energies into something useful.

  Utz made his mind up. ‘The Spaghetti Eater’ would have to be bought: if only to rescue it from Dr Frankfurter’s sweaty hands. But he would not give in without a fight!

  The Doctor – Doctor in what was a mystery – took the line that he was offering the object as a mark of special friendship. He showed Utz a book in which it was illustrated; a chemical analysis of the paste, and a bill from an auction sale in 1949.

  ‘And the price is a “prix d’ami”,’ he said, not once but repeatedly. He could sell it in America ten times over. For twice the amount!

  ‘Why don’t you?’ Utz called his bluff.

  His tactic was to pooh-pooh the productions of the Naples factory. The object, he insisted, was not really in his line – although he would like it in the collection ‘for the purpose of comparative study’.

  The day was overcast and drizzly. He looked from the window at the trees of the Parc de l’Allier. He had counted on being able to knock a third off the price. Dr Frankfurter was obstinate as a mule.

  Five times, the dealer stalked off down the corridor with the box under his arm. Five times Utz called him back. Once, they got as far as the lobby, where the other guests were astonished to see two middle-aged gentlemen jabbering in German at the tops of their voices.

  Eventually, they struck a deal: out of sheer exhaustion!

  There followed a hasty packing of suitcases and a train journey to Geneva — where Utz had promised to withdraw the sum in cash. Neither spoke. Dr Frankfurter was congealed with anxiety that Utz might wriggle out of the bargain. Utz was sunk in gloom that he hadn’t gone on bargaining further.

  They shook hands, frostily, on the steps of the Union de Banques Suisses.

  ‘So, till next year!’ said Dr Frankfurter.

  ‘Till next year!’ Utz nodded, and turned his back on the taxi.

  He returned to the bank, to examine his purchase alone.

  He entered the familiar underground corridor where the lines of stainless-steel deposit boxes seemed to stretch away, like railway lines, to vanishing point. Who knew what treasures they contained? Enough to fill a museum, he chuckled. With a lot of expensive junk!

  At intervals along the corridor there were tables, lit with anglepoise lamps, where customers could gloat over their possessions. A woman in a red wig sat fingering an emerald bracelet. Beyond her, a Lebanese dealer in antiquities was protesting the authenticity of a corroded bronze animal. His client, an excitable young man in spectacles, denounced it as a fake.

  Utz heard the young man say ‘Archifaux!’ — and trembled.

  Perhaps Dr Frankfurter had also sold him a fake? His fingers tore at the tissue-paper. He scrutinised the object with a pocket-magnifying glass – and breathed again.

  ‘Out of the question! It has to be genuine!’

  The spaghetti was a marvel. Pulchinella’s nose was a marvel. The enamels surpassed in subtlety the colours of Meissen. He had done the right thing. It was cheap. Cheap, when one thought of it. Besides, he adored it! And when the time came to return it to its stainless-steel coffin, he hesitated.

  ‘No,’ he told himself. ‘I cannot leave it here.’

  Thus, when others were bent on smuggling out of Czechoslovakia, in diplomatic bags or a foreign friend’s suitcase, any article of value they could lay their hands on — a snuff-box, an ancestral decoration, or a vermeil dessert service, fork by fork – Utz embarked on the opposite course.

  ‘I smuggled it in,’ he whispered.

  He was standing in the middle of the room, roughly equidistant from the lynx and the turkey-cock. I rose to join him, almost barking my shin on the corner of the Mies van der Rohe table. ‘The Spaghetti Eater’ stood on the central shelf, to the right of Madame de Pompadour.

  ‘Marta,’ Utz called.

  The maid came in with a fresh plate of canapes: but the moment she took stock of our position, she withdrew to the kitchenette and, reaching for a couple of aluminium saucepans, began to bang them together like cymbals.

  ‘They cannot hear us now,’ he said, standing on tiptoe. He had put his mouth to my ear.

  ‘Are they listening?’

  ‘All the time!’ he sniggered. ‘There is a microphone in this wall. One in that wall. Another in the ceiling, and I know not where else. They listen, listen, listen to everything. But this everything is too much for them. So they hear nothing!’

  The saucepans clattered like the noise of a pneumatic drill. From under our feet there was another noise, of a stick or broom-handle being thumped against the ceiling of the apartment below, presumably by the furious soprano.

  ‘Some days,’ he continued, ‘they call me and say “Utz, what are you doing over there? Breaking porcelains?” “No,” I say. “That is Marta cooking supper.” One of them, I have to say it, is a very humorous person. We are friends.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Telephone friends. We now learn to like each other. That is correct, no?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘So I say it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good,’ he repeated. ‘Now I will ask you questions.’

  Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . .

  ‘How much would cost today a Kaendler harlequin in auction sale in London?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ he frowned. ‘You know porcelains so nicely and you don’t know prices.’

  ‘I’d be guessing.’

  ‘Go on,’ he giggled. ‘Guess it.’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds.’

  ‘Ten thousand? How much that in dollars?’

  ‘Not quite thirty thousand.’

  ‘You are right, sir!’ Utz closed his eyes. ‘Last one sold twenty-seven thousand dollars. That was in America. Parke-Bernet Galleries. But it was broken as to the hand.’

  Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang!
. . .

  ‘So how much the Augustus Rex vases?’

  I cannot recall the size of the figure I mentioned. Certainly, I thought it high enough to give him pleasure. But he looked dismayed, bit his lip, and said, ‘More! More!’

  A single vase had fetched more in Paris, at the Hotel Drouot. This was a complete garniture, without a crack or blemish anywhere.

  Little by little, I was drawn into the spirit of the guessing game. I learned, with practice, to come up with the figures he wanted to hear and, in this way, I valued the bittern, the rhino, the Brühl tureen, Fröhlich and Schmeidl, the Pompadour and even ‘The Spaghetti Eater’.

  We stood for almost an hour. Utz would point to an object on the shelves. Marta would bang her saucepans. I would cup both hands around his ear, stickying my fingers on his brilliantine, and whispering higher and higher prices.

  From time to time, he let out a squeal of joy. Finally, he said, ‘So how much the whole collection?’

  ‘Millions.’

  ‘Ha! You are right,’ said Utz. ‘I am a porcelain millionaire.’

  The clatter of saucepans died away: to be followed, a few minutes later, by the sound of sizzling fat.

  ‘You will eat with me?’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’

  Utz pretended not to hear.

  ‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’

  He flinched. His face became contorted with a nervous tic. He fumbled with a cufflink, shot an agonised glance in the direction of the kitchenette — and pulled himself together.

  ‘Ja! Ja! You may do that!’ he stuttered, and ushered me, past a double bed, into an immaculate bathroom with a frieze of green-and-lilac jugendstil tiles and a bathtub on which the enamel had worn thin.

  I closed the door behind me – and saw an astonishing garment.

  Suspended from a hook there was a dressing-gown: but instead of a plaid or a camel-hair dressing-gown, this was a robe of quilted, peach-coloured art silk, with appliqué roses on the shoulders and a collar of matching pink ostrich plumes.